Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[digitalwanderer]

OMG that does remind me of the trash games deluge that ended the Atari 2600! I had no idea such crappy stuff was going around, thanks for the keekles!

 

[Seanspeed]

Kyle Bosman has found some on the these shops that are arguably even lower effort and terrible:

 

[Silent_Buddha]

OMG that does remind me of the trash games deluge that ended the Atari 2600! I had no idea such crappy stuff was going around, thanks for the keekles!

You must have missed the whole "Life of Black Tiger" on PlayStation thing.

Regards,
SB

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Look everyone, it's Elly

 

[Karamazov]

Ellie phone home

 

[Panino Manino]

DirectStorage is developed to fully utilize the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but the technology is also compatible with SATA SSDs and even traditional hard disk drives. This means Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC can use the same technology for loading data, regardless of the storage device in your system.

I remember there was some controversy about changing words only being possible with fast storage, at least the way the devs done, without "tricks", just brute force.
But the official minimum requirements say that the game works on a "slow" hard disk. How will it work? Game will work the same way even installed on a HDD? Will it use more RAM to compensate and allow for the "instant" transitions?

 

[Remij]

I remember there was some controversy about changing words only being possible with fast storage, at least the way the devs done, without "tricks", just brute force.
But the official minimum requirements say that the game works on a "slow" hard disk. How will it work? Game will work the same way even installed on a HDD? Will it use more RAM to compensate and allow for the "instant" transitions?

I assume on lower end hardware when the game stresses the streaming system in some cases the textures will take some extra time to stream in. In the cases of the on-rails portal transitioning, it will likely just hold the transition animation of Ratchet/Rivet spinning around in the portal a bit longer until it's done and they pass through. As for the portals you can trigger yourself, all that data will already be streamed into system memory by then, so I'm expecting it to be essentially the same as it is on PS5.

Will be interesting to see how this game performs on the Steam Deck

 

[see colon]

I assume on lower end hardware when the game stresses the streaming system in some cases the textures will take some extra time to stream in. In the cases of the on-rails portal transitioning, it will likely just hold the transition animation of Ratchet/Rivet spinning around in the portal a bit longer until it's done and they pass through. As for the portals you can trigger yourself, all that data will already be streamed into system memory by then, so I'm expecting it to be essentially the same as it is on PS5.

Will be interesting to see how this game performs on the Steam Deck

What's interesting is that the lowest system requirements only list 8GB of system memory.

 

[SmooTh]

 

[Below2D]

Alright, this is really awesome. I had no idea Xenia was so advanced in its development. RDR runs almost 3x as fast on Xenia compared to RPCS3.

 

[Riddlewire]

I don't know if it's Xenia, this game specifically, or just emulation in general, but Intel Arc runs horribly when attempting to play this game through Xenia.

 

[Below2D]

I don't know if it's Xenia, this game specifically, or just emulation in general, but Intel Arc runs horribly when attempting to play this game through Xenia.

Likely just Intel Arc isn't up to speed with emulation yet.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Alright, this is really awesome. I had no idea Xenia was so advanced in its development. RDR runs almost 3x as fast on Xenia compared to RPCS3.

Yup, I discovered this first hand myself recently after trying to run RDR on RSPC3 which in the opening town can run in the low 20's or worse on my 5800X3D. I downloaded Xenia specifically just for this game and it runs beautifully with that. Still a decent looking game too at high res.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Alright, this is really awesome. I had no idea Xenia was so advanced in its development. RDR runs almost 3x as fast on Xenia compared to RPCS3.

I would imagine a large part of that is that it's likely much easier to emulate an X360 than it is to emulate the PS3. While emulating the GPU of each should be relatively straightforward, I imagine the 3 core Xenon CPU in the X360 is significantly easier (and thus faster) to emulate than the Cell CPU in the PS3.

Regards,
SB

 

[chris1515]

DF Weekly: How will Ratchet and Clank PC handle the PS5's SSD requirement?

A while back, I wrote a DF Direct Weekly blog explaining why Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart's PC port is crucial for the…

www.eurogamer.net

What is surprising many is that at the absolute low-end, it is possible to run Ratchet and Clank without an SSD, even though it's still recommended. This has led some to believe that prior claims from Insomniac that the game couldn't work without the PS5 SSD are erroneous - but I think it's fairly safe to say that the game as delivered on PS5 won't work on a mechanical hard drive. It's all about scalability, something that Nixxes values highly in its ports - the idea of making these games as accessible as possible across a range of kit. Of course, the experience you'll get on the very low preset won't look much like the PlayStation 5 game - that should go without saying - but at least there'll be fallbacks for those without high-end rigs. And it's not just about storage: the min spec GPU is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960, which typically only ships with 2GB of memory. I've got to check that out to see how that looks. And yes, we will be checking out the complete min spec experience at launch in our review content as it seems I have all the required components.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Looks like they will be all over this port testing various aspects that we all want to see. Can't wait for the coverage!

 

[eastmen]

DF Weekly: How will Ratchet and Clank PC handle the PS5's SSD requirement?

A while back, I wrote a DF Direct Weekly blog explaining why Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart's PC port is crucial for the…

www.eurogamer.net

They got caught believing the hype and are trying to walk it back. It should be easy to test with and without a mechanical drive on an zen/rdna 2 platform with similar specs to a ps5 and the truth will simply come out. the fact that its possible to run off a mechanical drive already shows that it would be possible on a mechanical drive and ps5.

 

[Nesh]

DF Weekly: How will Ratchet and Clank PC handle the PS5's SSD requirement?

A while back, I wrote a DF Direct Weekly blog explaining why Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart's PC port is crucial for the…

www.eurogamer.net

Well, curious to see if there are delays on the dimensional/world switch. But I suppose cutting huge amounts of detail, to fit only 2GBs VRAM, does reduce the memory footprint to such an extend that you simply do not need an SSD to stream huge chunks of data. Note that the lowest configuration is the only one that says HDD. For the rest (recommended and upwards) we may have to test if the game allows HDD and if yes how it performs.

 

[see colon]

They got caught believing the hype and are trying to walk it back. It should be easy to test with and without a mechanical drive on an zen/rdna 2 platform with similar specs to a ps5 and the truth will simply come out. the fact that its possible to run off a mechanical drive already shows that it would be possible on a mechanical drive and ps5.

The hype was backed up by developer comments, though. They spoke with certainty and authority regarding the merits of PS5's IO.
Example

There are some big, obvious features we can see in terms of the benefits of the PS5, like the fast load times or the rifts that pull you into a parallel world immediately. But are there any examples of smaller, less obvious things that are cool or that you’re really proud of that wouldn’t have been possible on the PS4?

With the SSD, it’s easy to say there are no load times, and look how fast we can load this other area, but it has all sorts of knock-on effects. We don’t need to be as careful with how we package our data. All of the assets for an area don’t need to be collated on the spinning hard drive to get the right streaming speed out of it. It makes the game smaller on your hard drive; it means we can patch it more easily. That’s a nice bonus. We unload the things literally behind you from a camera perspective. If you spun the camera around, we could load them before you see that. That lets us devote all of our system memory to the stuff in front of you right now, that you need to experience in that moment.

I'm excited to see how this game runs on a variety of hardware. It's system requirements are much lower than I expected. I hope someone gets it running on an AMD FX CPU and an R7 GPU (or less), just because I want to see how low it can go. But I'd also like to see it run on a variety of drive speeds on a higher end system. HDD, SHDD, SATA SSD, and NVME.

 

[eastmen]

The hype was backed up by developer comments, though. They spoke with certainty and authority regarding the merits of PS5's IO.
Example


I'm excited to see how this game runs on a variety of hardware. It's system requirements are much lower than I expected. I hope someone gets it running on an AMD FX CPU and an R7 GPU (or less), just because I want to see how low it can go. But I'd also like to see it run on a variety of drive speeds on a higher end system. HDD, SHDD, SATA SSD, and NVME.

And they should have questioned it then and didn't. Just because a dev says something shouldn't mean you just blindly believe it