The day has come to be able to enjoy pc of one of the great PS5 exclusives, the Ratchet & Clank: A Dimension Apartnot without certain controversies regarding the specifications and final performance, although we could say that it is foggy regarding the final result.
The action and platform game, starring the lombax Ratchet and his robotic companion Clank, transports us to an impressive universe broken into several multiverses. All this full of details where we will be dazzled by its incredible settings. And it is that if we can highlight something about this new installment of the saga developed by Insomniac Games, it is how the graphic capacity exploits. We could see it on the PS5 and now we confirm it on PC.
Starting with the narrative, Ratchet & Clank: A Dimension Apart takes us some time after the heroics performed by both characters defeating Nefarius. Thus, in a great celebration, we will see how Clank decides to give Ratchet a powerful artifact, the Dimensioner. But as it usually happens, Nefarius himself returns with his henchmen and manages to take over the Dimensioner. And although our first objective is to recover it, we end up producing an unparalleled accident, generating dimensional distortions that give access to another parallel dimension as well as other altered spaces.
This will be how we will discover that in the parallel dimension there is a universe very similar to the original one and, furthermore, in which another lombax, Ribet, lives. But far from being as recognized as Ratchet by her people, she fights within the resistance against none other than Emperor Nefarius. And since she couldn’t be less, Ribet is a playable character who also, being to some extent Ratchet’s dimensional mirror, will enjoy the same abilities and improvements that we get with the original lombax.
From PS5 to PC, under the baton of Nixxes
At this point the first thing to mention is that the Nixxes team is once again established as a trusted studio doing ports. And in this case, he has done it in a superior way. Although we have already seen his excellent work in games like Marvel’s Spider-Man and miles morales on PC and Rise of the Tomb Raiderwithout the latter being a Sony IP, tWe have before us a version that is far superior on a technical level compared to the PS5 version with excellent results, although not suitable for all teams.
Even with the good work and graphic finish on PC, it seems that it has had a rather timid reception, reviewing the peaks of this release compared to other great jewels from Sony. We do not know if it could be due to the distance from the original launch, lack of publicity or technical requirements. Even so, reviewing on Steam, we can see that the opinions in general are very good.
- God of War ― 73,529 concurrent users
- Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered ― 66,436 concurrent users
- Horizon Zero Dawn ― 56,557 concurrent users
- The Last of Us: Part I ― 36,496 concurrent users
- Days Gone ― 27,450 concurrent users
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart ― 8757 concurrent users
- Returnal ― 6691 concurrent users
- Sackboy: A Big Adventure ― 610 concurrent users
Particularly, regardless of these numbers, the movement to continue porting exclusives from PS5 to PC is still a success. Thus, a part of the public is given the option of enjoying great games such as Ratchet & Clank: A Dimension Apartas long as they don’t mind waiting 1 or 2 years for the original premiere.
Entering the technical section, we are going to do a small and brief analysis with our impressions and performance with our test team. Our team was a:
- Intel Core i9-13900K
- Asus Rog Maximus Z790
- Corsair DDR5 DRAM VENGEANCE 64GB 6600MHz C32
- Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4080 TRINITY OC 16GB GDDR6X DLSS3
- WD Blue SN570 NVMe 3500MB/S
- Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix Liquid Cooler
- Windows 11 Pro
As we mentioned in the technical requirements In a leak, which in the end were the final requirements, in principle we were going to be able to enjoy our furry friends on more humble and low-performance equipment, even with a lifetime mechanical hard drive.
These were the requirements:
Expand to see in detail.
It must be borne in mind that, according to Insoniac Games, when the game came out on PS5 it was sold as a title that needed a high-performance SSD. However, for the port de PC have adapted it for computers that do not have these hard drives, but without great success, since the technical requirement is very high.
The reality has been that, despite the fact that in the graphic section it holds up extraordinarily well for us even with the configuration to a minimum, the main obstacle we have is the dynamic loading and streaming of levels due to the design of the game.
If you have an NVMe SSD you are going to enjoy what is not written, since it is a technical marvel, especially the first 10 minutes of the game, in which we are going to jump from world to world instantly without knowing anything else. minimum charging times. Of course, if we jump to a SATA SSD and even a mechanical hard drive, the experience may be cloudy, and we will get frustrated with how it was initially designed.
A very interesting user video Alex Grant shows us a comparison with different hard drives and even micro SSD. To close this point, it may be far from being able to enjoy it on Valve’s laptop, Steam Deck, especially due to loading times.
graphics performance
Leaving aside the issue of loads, which is not unimportant, we jump to a brief summary at the level of graphic performance and frame rate.
Once again, we want to highlight the test equipment that we have, which is obviously a high-performance equipment, but that does not mean that we are aware that not everyone will be able to enjoy it in this way.
As we mentioned in other articles, this port supports NVIDIA DLSS 3 (frame generation) and AMD FSR2 and Intel XeSS technologies. Thanks to this, many people will be able to take advantage of getting enough frames of more to be able to improve the experience of gameplay.
Starting with the graphics options at maximum, RT and 4K, it is important to say that, in our tests, we have seen that it was necessary to restart when making certain DLSS changes, since we saw an increase in frames. So, by making these changes in gamewe saw some improvement, but really when we restarted the game, we saw the final performance we had with these options applied.
the mean of frames that we have had with all the options to the maximum without DLSS activated or generation of frames were around 50-60 frames with drops to 30-40 on certain occasions. Most of the frames are taken by the Ray Tracing options.
When we already make the leap to use the DLSS in quality mode and generation of frames, the frame rate we easily shoot at 100-120 frames on average with drops at 80-90 frames, and some considerable drops at 60. A very good implementation of this system in which you can get a lot of juice out of frames without hardly losing appreciable quality for any gamer half.
In our case, we have not had any problem, but we have been able to read reviews from some people that the game closes from time to time or even crashes. We have also seen that the development team has already been adding several patches to correct these problems, but nothing is further from the reality that we had with releases like Last of Us Part 1 for PC or Jedi Survivor.
At the graphic level, we have an excellent sample of the new generation finish, we already had it on PS5, but we can corroborate it with this port on PC, within its great artistic style.
We hope to have more future ports of this quality and with this stability at the level of other great jewels from Sony.
SUMMARY
We can consider this port a very good job but also with very high technical requirements, especially at the hard drive level, in which more than one person can be made to think about jumping to an nvme SSD or doing an update on a future, as long as the economy allows it. We could say that we have impeccable optimization, but the reality is that the small bump of having an SSD may be a problem for more than one person.
Analysis carried out by Ignacio Santalla Martín
