The just-released PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart looks to be one of the better PC ports of recent times.

The only thing that makes me hesitate to call this port a definitive success is that among the favorable Steam reviews there are reports of crashes, and Digital Foundry has found some discrepancies between the graphical quality of the PS5 version and the pre-release PC version, especially in certain ray-traced The two most significant findings are that they found some discrepancies in the shadows that were Personally, I don't have the hardware or vision to make such discrepancies problematic, nor have I experienced any crashes. So far, Insomniac's 2021 platformer for PS5 feels like a robust and polished piece of software for the PC.

With Nvidia's DLSS upscaling, I can hover between 50-70 fps at the highest graphics preset of 1440p despite slightly outdated hardware: Nvidia RTX 2070 Super, Intel Core i5 9600K @ 3.7 GHz, 16GB RAM.

With DLSS off, Rift Apart is still playable enough, although fps can drop into the 30s. Of course, I'm not a heathen and even the lowest presets look good enough; Rift Apart also supports AMD FSR 2.1, Intel XeSS, and Insomniac's own IGTI upscaling.

When the big PlayStation games finally break through the exclusivity barrier and make their way to the PC, we don't know what we'll get. God of War was good, and so was Insomniac's remastered version of Spider-Man, but the bugs in the PC port of The Last Of Us were dire enough to generate memes, which is never a good sign. We did not receive an early review copy of the PC version of Rift Apart, which is not entirely unusual, and sometimes foretells the existence of a flaw, making us a little wary.

However, other than reports of crashes, we found nothing to complain about; Rift Apart has everything you could ask for in a PC port:

Steam Deck performance is also surprisingly solid; we asked PC Gamer's Tyler Colp to test his Steam Deck and found that with the AMD FSR frame rate target set to 45 and the Deck refresh rate set to 40Hz, he was able to consistently maintain 40fps. He preferred this setting rather than trying to pull a slightly higher fps, as the 40Hz limit worked to his advantage in terms of battery life. However, the game crashed only once during his Steam Deck testing.

Back on his own PC, even with the lowest possible graphics settings with the help of DLSS, he was unable to match the monitor's 144 Hz refresh rate, and the maximum he could pull from the Rift Apart at 1440p was 100-120 fps. 2019 GPU and a 2018 CPU, it's not entirely reasonable to expect screaming speeds from a new console port, but I tried lowering the resolution to 800x600, and the fps still hovered in the 120s, peaking at 140. Frame rate obsessives may be dissatisfied with the range of speeds achievable.

A formal evaluation of "Ratchet & Clank" is still pending: A formal evaluation of "Rift Apart" is still pending, and this technical evaluation may need to be revised due to performance issues and bugs that may be encountered later in the game.Digital Foundry also reported in the pre-release version that some players say Rift Apart crashes frequently. We hope that this problem will be resolved. We hope that this problem will be resolved, as it would be encouraging to see a new shining star to point to as a standard of quality in the midst of the wave of PC ports.

As for the games themselves, I'm not a fan of these hyper-streamed, prestige console-exclusive action-adventure titles, but the first few minutes of "Rift Apart" speak well for why they are so lauded. Learning the controls in a tutorial mission and setting up everything you need to know about the plot without getting bored is not something that can be accomplished that often. That said, I stopped there and will leave it to reviewers to make a proper evaluation in the near future.