If you happen to be one of those few PlayStation 4 owners who haven’t made the leap to the PlayStation 5 yet, brace yourself for some potentially vexing news. Sony’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is now playable on the Steam Deck.
Yes, you heard that right. The PlayStation 5 exclusive, which recently got a PC adaptation, is now Steam Deck verified. This means that the title, which previously seemed almost unplayable without an SSD, is now fully playable on Valve’s handheld PC.
Dutch developer and legendary porter Nixxes Software, responsible for the game’s PC port development, earlier this year disclosed the system requirements for running the game on a PC. Games that are labeled Steam Deck Verified need to meet certain criteria. These include:
- Input: The title should have full controller support, use appropriate controller input icons, and automatically bring up the on-screen keyboard when needed.
- Display: The game should support the default resolution of Steam Deck (1280×800 or 1280×720), have good default settings, and text should be legible.
- Seamlessness: The title shouldn’t display any compatibility warnings, and if there’s a launcher it should be navigable with a controller.
- System Support: If running through Proton, the game and all its middleware should be supported by Proton. This includes anti-cheat support.
Alright, so Rift Apart is officially Steam Verified, which is pretty neat. That said, hitting minimum requirements on paper is one thing – the real question is, how well does it perform on the Steam Deck? Well, that’s an entirely different story.
Rift Apart has earned its reputation as one of the few games that truly encapsulates the power of the PS5, and this is largely attributed to the console’s lightning-fast SSD. The NVMe SSD allows the titular character Ratchet to jump across completely different worlds seamlessly without any stuttering or bothersome load screens.
Lots of controversy at the moment about how meaningful 'Steam Deck Verified' actually is. First impressions of Ratchet and Clank – on far from very low settings – look creditable. Here's a quick capture I did earlier. pic.twitter.com/Hjks4QbJio
— Digital Foundry (@digitalfoundry) July 26, 2023
This is made possible by the console’s unique architecture, which enables the APU to directly load data into memory and decompress it in real time. Since both the CPU and GPU have access to this data, the GPU can directly retrieve assets from the SSD without the need to pass through the CPU first.
Rift Apart’s seamless performance on the PS5 owes its success to the integration of Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.2. Leveraging the power of GPU decompression through the DirectStorage API, the game effortlessly renders high-quality textures and immersive environments with a high level of detail as players traverse through portals.
For the PC version, this remarkable achievement is made possible by NVIDIA’s cutting-edge technology, NVIDIA RTX IO, which effectively bypasses the bottlenecks associated with traditional I/O processes.
Unfortunately for the Steam Deck, it lacks both DirectStorage and NVIDIA RTX IO. So, while the game manages to run reasonably well at 30 fps on low settings, frequent freezes occur when transitioning between different dimensions.
Reddit users have even reported more severe stutters, going as far as labeling the game as “completely unplayable.” These issues have raised doubts among fans about the validity of the ‘Steam Deck Verified’ tag, as it appears to signify only playability rather than optimization. Of course, forums like Reddit also like to exaggerate drama.
Currently, the PC port appears to be the most viable choice. At the minimum, all you need is a GeForce GTX 960 or Radeon RX 470 graphics card, along with 8GB of RAM. Have you tried out Rift Apart on the Steam Deck? We’d love to hear your honest review and experience in the comments section below.
