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DF - Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart PS5 - The Digital Foundry Tech Review

I'll need to watch later but oh boy we are in for a treat. Unfortunately I have to go away for a friend's bachelor party, I'll be jealous of my wife who will get to play it all weekend.
 
pzOu7Gm.jpg
Haha
I mean half the destruction looks like trash, foliage is meh. Walking on the grass looks terrible.
I just find the better something looks the more bad I notice. Texture poppin. Stuff like that.
 

Fake

Member
Cross-gen can't limit the use of RT to be honest.

No, but can limit the time. Companies have a deadline to finish their games, so not dedicating one hardware would consume more time and affect the quality of both.

You can't just put RT inside your game and call Raytracing. Need to be decent.
 
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CamHostage

Member
I think you meant this as a joke, but just for anyone who might accidentally think this is the same thing Ratchet is doing... all Portal does is shift you from one area of the existing loaded in map to another, whereas Ratchet is loading in an entirely new environment instantaneously from scratch, with your player character as the only constant.

Kind of, but these Pocket Dimension sections where Ratchet walks across two levels can't be using that same dump-and-load technique used in the Dimension Rift sequences (where Ratchet has to fall through that zone of mirror-like rifts before showing up in an area). It has to have both maps resident in memory at the same time (or chunks of maps; I notice a lot of the Pocket Dimensions we've seen start or stop in a tunnel or room, so maybe that's part of the trick?) The Pocket Dimensions are probably limited maps (in terms of details, with lots of repeating bits of structure and maybe some limits on textures) that can live at the same time as the main map that you are on, and you'd only need to spare a set amount at a time to have them the two areas living in memory at the same time (the SSD might also be streaming as much of the map into memory as it can while it is forgetting the first map, so you'd need the initial expanse but maybe a big boulder or balloon is covering your view of parts of the map that aren't ready yet while you're still walking across.)

WLEgkn@facebook.gif

GIF-08-06-2021-16-50-17.gif


(Both of these Rift types exist in the game; one that's dump-and-load and the other that is two-in-one.)

So these areas would be more similar to The Medium or Portal (assuming they're not doing something wild out of my imagination to pull this off,) but it's still using the fast loading to get these areas in and out, whereas The Medium needs to always budget for less than half the memory at a time for a stage (because it needs two versions of that stage at the same time, for either split-screen or for its flash-switch effects) and then Portal is portaling to its own stage so we're not really talking about stage data memory at that point.

R&C Rift Apart is for sure the exciting next-gen version of this portal/rift concept, but Insomniac didn't throw away everything that worked before just because they have a shiny new toy to play with.

Can you spin the camera around while walking through?

Yes. And you can walk back and forth between the two.
 
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Kind of, but these Pocket Dimension sections where Ratchet walks across two levels can't be using that same dump-and-load technique used in the Dimension Rift sequences (where Ratchet has to fall through that zone of mirror-like rifts before showing up in an area). It has to have both maps resident in memory at the same time (or chunks of maps; I notice a lot of the Pocket Dimensions we've seen start or stop in a tunnel or room, so maybe that's part of the trick?)



Yes. And you can walk back and forth between the two.
Impressive!
 

TwistedSyn

Member
Man Insomniac is doing some black magic with this game. Congrats to the team.
Also with elliot5 post, I can't imagine what Portal 3 would look like with this kind of tech.
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
No, but can limit the time. Companies have a deadline to finish their games, so not dedicating one hardware would consume more time and affect the quality of both.
That's just not true dude. These graphics engines already have implementation for RT. That's already been a given based on the PC getting RT treatment a couple of years ago. You are looking at CDPR's lack of ability to make a proper next-gen code for Cyberpunk? That's about the only case that would prove your argument. But all the other game companies didn't push their games out the door even if the last-gen versions weren't ready yet like CDPR.
 
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Ok, we know that the hardware is there and is capable. E3 is in one week? I hope will see some, any Box game deliver impressive visuals, finally.
 

Fafalada

Fafracer forever
That is the same room, no?
To be fair - as far as rendering workload goes, that's completely irrelevant (And it was irrelevant for The Medium too). Multiple views are multiple views (unless they are 5 degrees apart and you cheat with reprojecting pixels), they take-up basically the same rendering horse-power in all these scenarios. It helps if you have tech-stack designed for it though - Medium made their lives harder mostly because Unreal sucks for the task at hand.

There are other things with regards to logic/simulation etc. (and of course, amount of memory needed to put things on screen) but these are neither here nor there. Eg. an average split-screen multiplayer game scenario is more memory demanding than what Portal does, for fairly obvious reasons.
 

BeardGawd

Banned
I think you meant this as a joke, but just for anyone who might accidentally think this is the same thing Ratchet is doing... all Portal does is shift you from one area of the existing loaded in map to another, whereas Ratchet is loading in an entirely new environment instantaneously from scratch, with your player character as the only constant. As you’d imagine, this requires a colossal amount of memory and power to accomplish. Nothing has ever done this before, including Portal or Titanfall 2 (which just changes textures on the existing loaded in map).
Actually no. If you can see through the viewport that section or a chunk has to already be in memory.
Kind of, but these Pocket Dimension sections where Ratchet walks across two levels can't be using that same dump-and-load technique used in the Dimension Rift sequences (where Ratchet has to fall through that zone of mirror-like rifts before showing up in an area). It has to have both maps resident in memory at the same time (or chunks of maps; I notice a lot of the Pocket Dimensions we've seen start or stop in a tunnel or room, so maybe that's part of the trick?) The Pocket Dimensions are probably limited maps (in terms of details, with lots of repeating bits of structure and maybe some limits on textures) that can live at the same time as the main map that you are on, and you'd only need to spare a set amount at a time to have them the two areas living in memory at the same time (the SSD might also be streaming as much of the rest of the map into memory while it is forgetting the first map, so you'd need the initial expanse but maybe a big boulder or balloon is covering your view of parts of the map that aren't ready yet while you're still walking across.

WLEgkn@facebook.gif

GIF-08-06-2021-16-50-17.gif


(Both of these Rift types exist in the game; one that's dump-and-load and the other that is two-in-one.)

So these areas would be more similar to The Medium or Portal (assuming they're not doing something wild out of my imagination to pull this off,) but it's still using the fast loading to get these areas in and out, whereas The Medium needs to always budget for less than half the memory at a time for a stage (because it needs two versions of that stage at the same time,) and then Portal is portaling to its own stage so we're not really talking about memory at that point.



Yes. And you can walk back and forth between the two.
Someone that actually understands.
 
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Guilty_AI

Member
That is the same room, no?
There is only one area being rendered in Portal.

R&C do something similar to what The Medium devs called “innovative”, “first time”, etc… but let’s not compare them because the results are too far a part.
Here's, Prey - 2006 game.




"but but the game doesn't look as good!"
Yes, this 2006 game definitely doesn't look as good as this other 2021 game.

If its not enough, heres another game that also has portals rendering 2 different maps.



^^^best part of this one is that it actually allows for custom maps, portals and everything, so its not like the devs are just tricking the system.


Time we stop drinking big corp kool aid and look at reality for a bit
 
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Three

Member
Kind of, but these Pocket Dimension sections where Ratchet walks across two levels can't be using that same dump-and-load technique used in the Dimension Rift sequences (where Ratchet has to fall through that zone of mirror-like rifts before showing up in an area). It has to have both maps resident in memory at the same time (or chunks of maps; I notice a lot of the Pocket Dimensions we've seen start or stop in a tunnel or room, so maybe that's part of the trick?) The Pocket Dimensions are probably limited maps (in terms of details, with lots of repeating bits of structure and maybe some limits on textures) that can live at the same time as the main map that you are on, and you'd only need to spare a set amount at a time to have them the two areas living in memory at the same time (the SSD might also be streaming as much of the map into memory as it can while it is forgetting the first map, so you'd need the initial expanse but maybe a big boulder or balloon is covering your view of parts of the map that aren't ready yet while you're still walking across.)

WLEgkn@facebook.gif

GIF-08-06-2021-16-50-17.gif


(Both of these Rift types exist in the game; one that's dump-and-load and the other that is two-in-one.)

So these areas would be more similar to The Medium or Portal (assuming they're not doing something wild out of my imagination to pull this off,) but it's still using the fast loading to get these areas in and out, whereas The Medium needs to always budget for less than half the memory at a time for a stage (because it needs two versions of that stage at the same time, for either split-screen or for its flash-switch effects) and then Portal is portaling to its own stage so we're not really talking about stage data memory at that point.

R&C Rift Apart is for sure the exciting next-gen version of this portal/rift concept, but Insomniac didn't throw away everything that worked before just because they have a shiny new toy to play with.



Yes. And you can walk back and forth between the two.
Insomniac have said they use the same technique as Spiderman. This means that they load cells of the map and those rooms would mean that you do not need to load anything other than that cell. Seeing far into the distance would mean loading either some low quality always present data in addition to the high quality assets for what's close or having that lower quality asset load too.
 
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Spidey Fan

Banned
You think Insomniac was working with an "unlimited" budget?

I don't think you understand how a well run business operates.
Higher budget means more crazy stuff. even insomniac is constrained by budget. why do you think they got bought by playstation. stable funding is better than chasing other publishers for funding. and you cant go overboard with that money, so your imagination is limited.
 

Spidey Fan

Banned
But according to some xbox fans this is a low budget game 🤷‍♂️
Who do I believe?
People do whatever it takes to look down on other platform. its hard to understand fanboys mind. Like let others enjoy what they have. Even if it was low budget, its still more impressive with how the product turned out. Like imagine what insane budget game would look like with kinda of work. But they wont get it. all they care is shitting on others work.
 

ethomaz

Banned
Here's, Prey - 2006 game.




"but but the game doesn't look as good!"
Yes, this 2006 game definitely doesn't look as good as this other 2021 game.

If its not enough, heres another game that also has portals rendering 2 different maps.



^^^best part of this one is that it actually allows for custom maps, portals and everything, so its not like the devs are just tricking the system.


Time we stop drinking big corp kool aid and look at reality for a bit

That is why I put the works between quotes… MS & The Medium devs keep trying to say “innovative”, “first time”, etc.
 

ethomaz

Banned
dunno, whatever cerny said in that road thing or something
Well here the transcibe.


The only time he uses the word "innovate" is:

"The increase in graphics performance over the past two decades has been astonishing but there are other areas in which we can innovate and provide a significant value to the game creators and through them the players.

That's why the SSD was very much on our list of directions to explore regardless of what came out of the conversations with game developers and publishers.

The biggest feature in this category is the custom engine for audio that's today's final topic."

I believe people put a lot of works in Cerny's mouth.... even when he was very clear in the Road of PS5.
But yes the I/O complex in PS5 is nothing like anything done before including PC.
 
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Spidey Fan

Banned
Innovative game design?
Ever heard of gta, and elder scrolls? Those are the only ground breaking games that wowed everyone, every time it gets released. Both games manage to reach insane level than their sequels.

All the eyes are on those 2 games. Internet will be wild once those games are announced and showcased. People will riot if its underwhelming than skyrim and gtav.

Medium at least did maintain both worlds alot longer than those games. and ratchet and clank outdid the medium.

I am just glad we have devs trying to outdo other games, and show the future. just like how ocarina of time, and mario at their time changed the landscape of gaming during their era. the same way skyrim and gtav defined what open world is. and BOW introduced the climbing, and gliding in the open world.
 

Rikkori

Member
It definitely looks incredible, but to me R&C is like Sony's Gears of War...every iteration is like the same old game just with better graphics. Hard to be excited about it.
 

ABnormal

Member
maxresdefault.jpg

rendering two different viewports at native resolution that you can walk through.. ok that's crazy

this is a joke dont get mad
In Portal and in The medium everything is already in ram, so the amount of detail that you can show has the limit of what you can cram in the area currently loaded (If you have two worlds at the same time in The medium, each one can have half ram avaliable for assets. If the accessible worlds would have been 3, the avaliable ram per world would have been one third, and so on. There are no instant loadings from the ssd, it's all in ram).

On the other hand, in R&C every level is instantly loaded from sdd, so you can have all the detail you want.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
In Portal and in The medium everything is already in ram, so the amount of detail that you can show has the limit of what you can cram in the area currently loaded (If you have two worlds at the same time in The medium, each one can have half ram avaliable for assets. If the accessible worlds would have been 3, the avaliable ram per world would have been one third, and so on. There are no instant loadings from the ssd, it's all in ram).

On the other hand, in R&C every level is instantly loaded from sdd, so you can have all the detail you want.
Pretty innovative, this I/O.
 
In Portal and in The medium everything is already in ram, so the amount of detail that you can show has the limit of what you can cram in the area currently loaded (If you have two worlds at the same time in The medium, each one can have half ram avaliable for assets. If the accessible worlds would have been 3, the avaliable ram per world would have been one third, and so on. There are no instant loadings from the ssd, it's all in ram).

On the other hand, in R&C every level is instantly loaded from sdd, so you can have all the detail you want.
It's not instant like the medium, it is very fast though.
 

FunkMiller

Gold Member
I would not count SSM out on that front. Regardless the cross gen or not.

GoW will be a beautiful looking game, no doubt... but it’s not going to innovate in any way, or give us a fresh new gameplay mechanic to get our teeth into. It’s a PS4 game, with a prettier Ps5 version (unless they are essentially making two different version of the same game, which seems highly unlikely). I realise a lot of folks are okay with that, but I’m disappointed I won’t be dazzled by anything new in the way that people appear to be in these reviews for Ps5 exclusive Ratchet.
 
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