After Sony announced that major first-party titles are being developed for both the PS4 and PS5 generation of consoles, Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart comes at the right time. It demonstrates the power and potential of the PlayStation 5 in a way that a cross-gen title couldn’t – and it shows what the next generation of hardware can do when a first-party developer focuses exclusively on it can concentrate. Insomniacs Spider-Man: Miles Morales was an exceptional PS4 / PS5 achievement – but Rift Apart shows what is possible when a generation leap in memory, CPU and GPU is skillfully used. Oh, and 60fps with ray tracing? No problem!
We all saw the trailers, right? In addition to the beautiful, detailed graphics, the fast SSD enables seamless transitions between completely different worlds – a characteristic gameplay feature of the new game, while the GPU is saturated with an astonishing level of detail. The ray tracing features of RDNA 2 are also used, with beautiful, high-resolution reflections. The good news is that the final game is better than the trailers. In fact, we were surprised that the Day One patch – which actually “dropped” last Saturday – improved the quality even further.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart – das Video-Review von Digital Foundry.
One of the early trailer sequences showed Ratchet flying through multiple dimensions in real time. In the original demo, there were noticeable performance issues as areas were loaded and unloaded, but it served as a stunning example of what was possible. The same sequence exists in the final game, and these issues are completely eliminated – at least for the most part. While I’ve occasionally noticed a single extra image in the frame-time curve, it’s dramatically better than in the demo. Also, in the original demo, these cracks weren’t represented using ray-traced reflections – if you watch the final game, you’ll see that they are now reflected. I think this is worth highlighting as it highlights a case where the final game has improved the visuals over the early trailer – it’s an upgrade!
In terms of how the review code has improved significantly with the Day-One patch, the Performance and Performance RT modes are now running smoother and I was intrigued to see that the RT reflections were originally a quarter of the resolution now seem to be working with 4K checkerboarding, which means a significant quality boost. Impressive thing. Similar to Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PS5, there are fidelity, performance, and performance RT modes in Rift Apart, which we’ll cover in a separate article.
But back to the core topic: The SSD is the game changer on the PS5 and the Rift mechanics integrate this into the gameplay. The simplest rift type appears during many combat sequences – aim at the rift and you immediately pull yourself to another area of the map. The crack object itself is pulled in the direction of the player and from a certain point you land in the new place. But there are also other places where portals lead to completely different areas. In this case, the game renders two unique viewing windows and both are fully displayed – motion blur, anti-aliasing, volumetrics, shadows, etc. are all correctly rendered in the two viewing windows, allowing seamless transitions between areas. The same two viewport technique is used to enable real, Star Wars-like transitions in real-time cutscenes. It might seem simple, but in this case, during the wipe effect, each viewing window is rendered at full frame rate and quality in real time.
And it gets even more ambitious when you arrive in the world known as Blizar Prime. Upon arrival, all that is left of this planet is floating debris, but when you hit certain large crystals, you are immediately transported to another version of this world, in an alternate dimension, before it was destroyed. These mechanics directly affect some of the puzzles you will be solving on this planet, and the transition between levels is almost instantaneous – just a brief flash of white in between. You have to manipulate elements in one dimension and then switch back to the other to move forward. As the game progresses, the dimensions change in the middle of the grind, which changes the layout of the level – the game not only switches between two maps, but also has to maintain the movement and position of the character.
The idea is similar to the “Effect and Cause” mission from Titanfall 2, in which you can switch between the time periods at the push of a button – the difference to Ratchet is that you switch between two customized maps, only one of which is in memory at any time is. If you switch between the two, only your character will remain in memory – everything else will be deleted and the data on the new card will be pulled from the SSD almost instantly. There are no tricks here – it’s just that fast. Nothing like that could be achieved on last-gen hardware: it’s both a visually stunning feature and one that’s critical to the way Rift Apart plays.
But it’s still a ratchet game, and Insomniac manages to hit the key basics. The focus of every action game is of course the characters. Ratchet and Rivet steal the show with their great level of detail. Insomniac transferred its hair lock system, first used in Miles Morales, to Ratchet to enable fine details in the fur of the many characters. It seems to use a combination of strands and shell textures to create different thicknesses of the fur. The models of the main characters have more than 250,000 triangles in their highest quality, not counting the strands of fur, which can significantly multiply this number.
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There are also excellent materials for fabric, leather, and metal applied to the costumes, as well as a realistic eye rendering system that features ray tracing reflections and specially designed secondary highlights to enhance the cartoon-like design. The characters also get a mix of ray-marched screen-space shadows for fine details, combined with traditional shadow maps that take care of the shadow details. This is combined with high quality animations that come with cartoon-like squeeze and stretch effects to accentuate movement. During the cutscenes, it’s fair to say that Rift Apart resembles a pre-rendered movie: the motion capture has been kept to a minimum and it shows, you don’t get the impression that the characters are marching around in a suit, it really looks like a cartoon.
Insomniac thus reveals what extra detail means for animated characters like this on a next-gen device, to the point where Ratchet’s PS5 rendering can compete with the 2016 CG movie. Of course, there are still aspects of rendering for movies that are not yet possible in real time, but it does give the impression that we are really close, and I would say that the PS5 actually has the edge in some ways. But not only the main characters receive such details. Turn on the photo mode and examine every enemy or NPC walking around and you will find a comparable level of quality. I was really surprised at how much detail can be found in the little things, to the point where used cartridge cases left in combat are actually fully detailed models with surprisingly rounded edges and ray traced reflections.
Yes, RT plays a huge role in Rift Apart. Like Spider-Man on the PS5, Ratchet uses hardware accelerated ray tracing reflections with materials of all kinds that tap into the reflection data. From large, flat, mirror-like surfaces to rougher surfaces that you will come across later, this adds depth to the world in ways that are different from the metropolis in Marvel’s Spider-Man. What is impressive to me is how realistic the reflections look on curved glass – in fact, the reflections even realistically tip over when you look into dome shapes. But it’s the quality of the reflections that impresses the most, and as I mentioned earlier, I was particularly pleased that the quality has continued to improve with the Day-One patch. It appears that Insomniac has switched to a checkerboard / sparse rendering solution for reflections – so the workload has increased but is still within the rendering budget. It’s really a nice leap in quality.
At this point, you should have a good idea of what to expect from the game. The fast loading, the ray tracing reflections, and the high level of detail take Rift Apart to a level that surpasses anything we’ve seen in a character action game before. It’s appropriately next-gen, but we haven’t talked about performance and image quality yet, so let’s go for that. For starters, the Day-One patch arrived when this video was already deep in production, so as we mentioned we’ll get into more detail soon, but first impressions are solid – the 60fps ray tracing mode is very fluid, as one would hope. The game’s 30fps fidelity mode is the default and native 4K is the goal. Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) is enabled and has a lower limit of 60 percent of 4K as the lowest possible resolution, but in reality the game lasts 2160p most of the time and rarely drops to 1800p when it gets really tough.
The key here is that the image quality is clean even when moving. Insomniac’s temporal injection solution is used here and has a great effect with this high number of pixels. It’s actually very similar to what we saw in Marvel’s Spider-Man for the PlayStation 5 launch when we use fidelity mode. The performance in this mode is really as expected: we see almost flawless 30 frames per second during the game. No matter how many particles there are, nothing affects the frame rate in this case – it’s very fluid, as one would hope it to be. The only exceptions result from camera cuts during the cutscenes, just like with Marvel’s Spider-Man. It’s not that performance drops, it’s more that Insomniac “appends” a frame to ensure the consistency of its temporal injection technique.
With that in mind, I’m convinced that Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is indeed a showcase title for the next generation of consoles. It’s a game that can’t be played on the PlayStation 4, but I believe that, much like previous installments in the series, it will stand the test of time. It builds on and improves upon the mechanics first introduced in the game in 2016 – it’s by far the best playable part of the franchise. It also raises the bar when it comes to storytelling – it retains the fun vibe of the originals, but you can tell that after the success of Marvel’s Spider-Man, the studio has gained confidence in its cutscene and setpiece alignment. This game is a real “event” and a great demonstration of the potential that lies dormant in the next generation of gaming hardware.
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