Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was famously among the first PlayStation 5 exclusives made by Sony’s internal studios, specifically Insomniac Games.
The titular rifts (dimensional portals) were said to be heavily based on the PS5’s SSD solution, to the point where it was stated that the game couldn’t be done as-is without it. Creative Director Marcus Smith explained in June 2020:
This is something that we never could have done on previous generations. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a game that utilizes dimensions and dimensional rifts. That would not have been possible without the solid-state drive of the PlayStation 5. The SSD is screamingly fast. It allows us to build worlds and project players from one place to another in near instantaneous speeds. It is an unbelievable game-changer in terms of we can now do gameplay where you’re in one world and the next moment you’re in another.
We’re loading up levels and that happens so quickly and in the action that you don’t even imagine that this is something we couldn’t do before, because it feels so natural. Long gone are loading screens. Now it’s all about bringing exciting new adventures.
However, when Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart finally landed on PC this past July, it didn’t actually require an SSD (unlike, for instance, Bethesda’s Starfield). Still, alongside a few weird issues like ray tracing being locked out of AMD graphics cards for some time, testing of the PC version showed that faster SSDs than the one available in Sony’s PlayStation 5 would be slightly slower loading the game’s portals (or rifts, if you prefer) than the console version.
It turns out there’s a simple fix for that. Twitter user Moeez Malik discovered that simply removing the cache.pso file from the game’s main folder allows the PC version to overtake PS5’s in load times.
Compusemble has now tested the tweak and found that the PC could load in 36:58 seconds when that file was removed, nearly a second and a half quicker than the 38:21 time measured with the .pso cache file still in place and about half a second quicker than the PS5 version (measured at 37:25). Of course, these aren’t big differences by any means, but it’s still puzzling to see.
Compusemble recommends loading Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart the first time with the .pso cache file still in the folder; after that, the shaders will be compiled elsewhere by your GPU and you will be free to delete the file without experiencing shader stuttering. Additionally, this tweak allows the game to load as fast as on PlayStation 5 even when DirectStorage is disabled, which has been found to yield slightly improved performance.
By the way, Nixxes is still improving the PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. The game received patch 1.831.0.0 last week, updating AMD FSR to version 2.2, improving frame pacing on graphics cards with 8GB VRAM or less, adding water deforming animation when swimming, and fixing some animations when running at high frame rates.
