Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will support DirectStorage and surrounding shading with rays tracing on PC

In the Steam message, which was deleted, Nixxes Software revealed some new interesting technical details about the Ratchet PC version & Clank: Rift Apart. According to the team, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will support Directstorage with decompression of the graphic processor on a PC, as well as the surrounding shading with rays tracing.

This is great news, since RTAO can significantly improve visual effects in shaded areas. We saw this in many games such as Metro: Exodus and F1 23.

As the developers explained:

“The surrounding shading is a method used in games to simulate how surrounding lighting affects the stage. Surrounding lighting is a form of indirect lighting: light reflected from other surfaces. This effect is mainly manifested in folds, cracks and angles, where the surfaces are located close to each other. Usually used methods of AO are SSAO (surrounding occlusion of the screen space) and HBAO+ (surrounding horizon -based occlusion). They are not very demanding to the iron, but do not give physically accurate results. RTAO uses rays tracing to further increase the realism of the surrounding shading in the game. We introduced RTAO as an addition to those who have high -performance systems with hardware compatible with rays tracing, and reserve computing power ”.

In addition to RTAO, the game will also support XEGTAO. XEGTAO is another Ambient OCCLUSION technique, comparable to HBAO+. What is also great is that, according to NIXXES, all graphic processors of all suppliers will support this Ambient OcClusion settings. XEGTAO generates the surrounding shading with very high resolution, which shows even the smallest details of geometry, which leads to a very high quality of the withdrawal.

Finally, Nixxes confirmed that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will support DirectStorage with GPU decompression. Most likely, this is the first game in which the decompression of the graphic processor for DirectStorage will be used.

“To ensure fast loading and an instant transition between measurements, the game should be able to quickly upload assets. DirectStorage provides fast loading, and decompression of the graphic processor is used for high graphics settings for streaming resources in the background during the game. Traditionally, this decompression is processed by the CPU, but at a certain moment there is an advantage in resolving it to a graphic processor, as this provides higher throughput for streaming resources from the storage to the graphic map. We use this to quickly load high -quality textures and a high level of detail “.

Please note that all Sata solid -state drives (and even traditional hard drives) can use the advantages of Directstorage. This applies not only to NVMe solid -state drives.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will be released on PC July 26. Official system requirements have become known today.