Turns out Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart CAN run on a hard drive... thanks to DirectStorage 1.2 on PC
This becomes the first DirectStorage 1.2 game with GPU decompression support.
In a recently taken down blog post on Steam (via WCCFtech), Nixxes, the developer behind the PC port of Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart, wrote that because of the recent DirectStorage update, you can play the former PS5 exclusive on a hard drive, albeit at its minimum settings.
When Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was initially announced, Insomniac's creative director, Marcus Smith, said that the game's dimensional rift gameplay "would not have been possible without the solid-state drive of the PlayStation 5."
However, it turns out that it is indeed possible.
The blog post also confirmed that this would be the first game to utilize DirectStorage with GPU compression.
"DirectStorage is designed to leverage the speed of fast PCIe NVMe SSDs, but the technology is also compatible with SATA SSDs and even traditional hard disk drives. This means that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC can utilize the same technology for loading data, regardless of the storage device in your system."
DirectStorage is a method for directly streaming data from an NVMe SSD to the GPU, bypassing the CPU and avoiding potential performance bottlenecks. This means that your GPU will handle decompressing game assets instead of your processor, improving performance.
With DirectStorage 1.2, developers can now use the same code for HDDs as well. Although legacy HDDs previously had some level of DirectStorage support, developers just had to jump through some extra hoops to make it work.
While this news benefits those still using older PCs with HDDs, the official specs page notes that the game can only be played at 720p and 30fps with a hard drive. Higher settings will reportedly require an SSD, as shown in the above image.
Though how much of that frame rate and resolution limit is down to the minimum GPU hardware and not the difference between SSD and HDD, we can't say until we have the game on our machines. Still, it will be interesting to see if other upcoming PC titles will implement DirectStorage 1.2 later this year.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is set to launch on PC on July 26.