Rift Apart requirements revealed, SSD not required, Cerny exposed as a fraud and liar

Smooth as silk on HDD.

Aaaaand it's up.

Looks like the game needed a bit more time in the oven. Some RT issues (not even working on AMD...yikes. Anyone tested on Intel Arc?). Bit of instability. Some texture loading issues. Maybe worth checking back on in a months time. Sony, to their credit, do good on post launch updates on the PC.

On the loading side. The HDD experience is....unpleasant. It technically works but the PS5 will clatter it in overall experience no matter how good the rest of the PC is.

It also seems that loading textures is spread amongst CPU and GPU decompression which is cool. However it also looks like, when using faster NVME drives, the loading times are CPU bottlenecked and it's core speed rather than core count that has the biggest effect. Strange as i would think texture decompression would be something that is very parallelisable. So maybe some work to do there to unlock "Teh hidden power of Teh PC!!!".

Yes, via RAM

PS5 vs PC by Nick is finally up:

To sum it up, this whole HDD argument is stupid regardless whatever Cerny's claimed to be. Playing Rift Apart isn't "unplayable" it really shows those loadings is lightly yet longer loads between dimensions jumps. Rift Apart is safe to play on HDD and with a good high speed Ram, you can brute forced that bitch pair with a high-end CPU to overcome those loading problems.

Edit: I'm gonna give Cerny some slack here. He knows if you wan the best experience next-gen console, having the SSD was vital to get that next-gen flavor is why it needed to be on PS5, not on PS4. Sony fanboys just took it for granted on the whole SSD being magical. PS4's Jaguar with it's ancient HDD was going to give the console player's worst experience. Overall, I'm betting the Jaguar is the worst fiend for Rift Apart.

@loudheadphones: lol no 😂

IGN caves into typical System Wars mentality of something being slightly off, and using Digital Foundry (and completely alienating what John Linneman actually said), as "broken".

Man, the more I play this game, the more reason I don't need a PS5 to play these "10/10 exclusives that only Sony delivers". Rift Apart is such a missed opportunity to improve on things, but it's just really underwhelming.

Nice graphics tho.

The PC version is missing stuff, however.

@davillain: The game had a hotfix about 12 hours ago. I think it fixed some things?

The video I've seen on DF didn't encourage me that you could play this game on a HDD. And most drives, even the 3.5" variety are only the slower 5,400rpm drives. It gets worse if you've connected such a drive via USB. Over USB the IOPS are just awful. Unless you you turn down the graphics and texture settings, playing off 'spinning rust' isn't really viable.

That being said, there is nothing to stop the developers optimising more RAM as a cache. For years 16GB has been enough for PC gaming, but, we're starting to see 32GB as the new norm for higher end systems. The most system RAM of seen my PC use for games is 13-14GB out out my available 32GB.

I also upgraded my Ram from 16 to 32GB just to play Returnal as it was heavily recommended 32GB Ram and depending on the area you are in, it reaches up to 15GB which I was surprised it reach that far had I stayed with 16GB Ram.

16GB Ram is really no longer the minimum, 32 is and probably next year or so, I'll probably upgrade to 64GB Ram maybe?

Haven't bought the game yet. Might just wait for a sale before purchasing it though.

Nah. While 32GB is probably going to be the new norm, I can't see 64GB being needed for the average gamer for at least the next 5 years or more. Remembering the current gen consoles only have 16GB total which is divided between system RAM and VRAM.

@davillain: I'm one of the biggest cow bashers here, but come on...do you really think someone with a $500 cpu and $1000 gpu will be running the game off an HDD??

But yes, it's good to see cows get rekkd. Cerny/Sony are certified frauds and liars, just like op said.