This story is part of Jacob Roach's ReSpec series, covering the world of PC gaming and hardware. Everyone owes Sony an apology. When the PS5 was announced and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was shown off as exclusive for the platform, there was a barrage of finger-pointing at Sony over the game’s next-gen exclusive status. The argument from Sony was that the game required the PS5’s world-class storage interface, and anything less simply wouldn’t work.
It won’t, as I’ll get to later, but there’s a problem brewing in the world of PC gaming centered around storage, and it’s becoming too big of a deal to ignore. Case in point: RTX IO. I recently wrote about RTX IO in Portal: Prelude RTX, and it was clear that the storage tech vastly improved texture loading times and shrunk the install size of the game considerably. One part of RTX IO that isn’t being talked about as much is how it lowers CPU utilization, which can make games much more stable.
A next-gen storage ecosystem A lot of this is the beginning stages of the storage interface we’ve seen in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 for nearly three years. Especially in games that are exclusive to next-gen consoles, such as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, developers are taking advantage of that storage interface. There are much more PC gamers overall, but the most recent data shows that consoles are where the lion’s share of new games are sold.
It’s just the storage that’s the problem. Sure, the game falls apart on a slow, dated PS4 hard drive, but it also doesn’t work on a standard 7,200RPM hard drive despite being technically supported. I experienced three crashes in the first 30 minutes of the game, a variety of stutters over every invisible loading zone, and the hilarious display of slow loading you can see below on a 7,200 RPM WD Black HDD.