Video shows Ratchet & Clank PC port struggling to run on a PS4 HDD

The first impressions of the PC port of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart have been published.

Respected hardware publication Digital Foundry has concluded that while the port is “impressive overall” and “a knockout from a visual perspective,” the team also feels “some level of disappointment that overall polish isn’t quite where it should be”.

Recent Sony PC ports, such as this year’s port of The Last of Us Part 1, have been criticized for launching in a poor state. At launch, The Last of Us had “mostly negative” reviews on Steam, with a significant number of players complaining about performance issues and crashes.

Later in the article, Digital Foundry highlights the ongoing discussion over the game’s ability to run slower machines with no SSD when previously Insomniac claimed that the SSD was essential for its PS5 version.

“The difference between the console experience and the ‘very low’ setting is frankly immense in terms of data transfer… You’ll witness the carnage of what happens when you try to run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on a launch PS4 512GB HDD – even the very low setting doesn’t work and the game eventually crashes,” it wrote.

Digital Foundry’s John Linneman posted a video to Twitter of the game running on those base settings, and the results are clear.

The game runs on the lowest possible setting, but at the first attempt to go through one of the game’s portals, it hangs in mid-air for several seconds, almost completely freezes, before eventually forcing itself into the next area.

“As we said,” James Stevenson, Insomniac’s director of community and marketing, commented in response to the video and Digital Foundry’s technical analysis of the PC version running off a PS4 hard drive.

“To make the game work across as many PCs as possible, Nixxes did what Insomniac did not need to: necessarily, they scaled the game by introducing quality presets and in common with Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, that includes increasing fidelity for higher-end systems and reducing it where needed,” the Digital Foundry piece continued.

Digital Foundry also mentioned to Twitter that with a more modern HDD, the game works “OK.”

Originally released for PS5 in June 2021, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was billed as an “interdimensional adventure” that uses the console’s SSD to rapidly transport players between different locations.

VGC’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart review called the game “a sumptuous showcase of what the PS5 can do.”