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

There is an unprecedented level of detail in everything from the bugs to the random non-interactive insects on the planets, to the shotgun shells fired at the ground... visually have been given special care with perfect graphics as well as reflections by RT.
As someone who get annoyed when I notice low detail ammo case this kind of details made me happy.

That looks a lot like Unreal's Nanite tech (which is why the PS5 has this SSD).... Pretty impressive stuff!
 

ABnormal

Member
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

It's always baffling how it's always the most confused and ignorant guys who act this arrogant and speak about "reality".

The examples you are suggesting have the levels already in ram. There's no instant streaming. It's just all there. And that is one of the reasons the detail is low: each level has a limited share of ram to store assets. In a game like that, if you have to have 10 different worlds to swithch from and to, the amount of avaliable ram for each would result in ps2 level of detail...
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
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.
We were talking about graphics though. He said, "i can only imagine how good God of War is gonna look"

I still wouldn't count SSM out, regardless. And what if, Ragnarok is the SM:MM of GoW :pie_thinking:
 
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Holy shit!

It all looks so incredible but the when he zoomed in on that little bug and it maintained the level of detail my jaw hit the floor 😲

Insomniac are just showing off at that point 😅

Can someone smarter than gif that part you would be a real sweetheart🥰
 
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.

what a lot of people are not realizing is that the cartoony and stylized nature of Rift Apart is what’s driving this.

Because environment and objects are so stylized. You don’t need high resolution textures. For example the stylized rocks in some of the environment only need 512x512 textures.

For a game focused on photorealistic (most games) this wouldn’t fly. The rock especially next gen would need 4K-8k textures and no less than 2k. Unless the rock would be a blurry mess. The geometry data would also be orders of magnitude more

Some of Rift Apart environment and objects would even only need a 1x1 texture (1kb). Because the stylized nature means you can use simple base color textures with a single generic scratch/decay diffuse and normal texture.

I wouldn’t be shocked if hundreds of objects were sharing just acouple textures. I would also be shocked if environment/ environment objects had textures above 512x512 or 1024x1024.
This is different to UE5 Valley of the ancient for example, where you need tens of GBs of texture data because you are using 4K-8k textures for all objects just for two worlds.
 
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GymWolf

Member
what a lot of people are not realizing is that the cartoony and stylized nature of Rift Apart is what’s driving this.

Because environment and objects are so stylized. You don’t need high resolution textures. For example the stylized rocks in some of the environment only need 512x512 textures.
For a focused on photorealistic (most of gaming) this wouldn’t fly. The rock especially next gen would need 4K-8k textures and no less than 2k. Unless the rock would be a blurry mess.

Some of Rift Apart environment and objects would even only need a 1x1 texture (1kb). Because the stylized nature means you can use simple base color textures with a single generic scratch/decay diffuse and normal texture.

I wouldn’t be shocked if hundreds of objects were sharing just acouple textures. I would also be shocked if environment/ environment objects had textures above 512x512 or 1024x1024.
This is different to UE5 Valley of the ancient for example, where you need tens of GBs of texture data because you are using 4K-8k textures for all objects just for two worlds.




d56bb58e7caeaf95aaaf67107c2d78e5.png
This is exactly why i always thought that reaching "pixar movie look" for a game is far easier than photorealistic look.

Of course without taking anything away from insomniac, i'm sure it is still super hard to get the pixar look with a 10 tf machine against server farms used in movies.
 
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LostDonkey

Member
I'd love to be able to buy a PS5 and try it out but it's been 7 months now almost and every time stock drops it's gone in 2 seconds.

So frustrating.
 
The one thing that just sticks out to me with everything looking so awesome - what is up with the fire? Like there is a section with a bunch of fire that looks like ps3 level fire, how are we not beyond that at this point in games? Small nitpick, just annoys me how those type of effects seemingly don’t improve much over the years. Performance RT mode looks great!
 

Guilty_AI

Member
It's always baffling how it's always the most confused and ignorant guys who act this arrogant and speak about "reality".

The examples you are suggesting have the levels already in ram. There's no instant streaming. It's just all there. And that is one of the reasons the detail is low: each level has a limited share of ram to store assets. In a game like that, if you have to have 10 different worlds to swithch from and to, the amount of avaliable ram for each would result in ps2 level of detail...
Ain't talking about streaming Mr. ABonermal, just showing the game isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before as some here truly seem to think this portal thing is some new next-gen thingy. Doesn't matter if its on RAM or not.

We'll talk again once we actually have a game where you jump between 10 different worlds whenever you want.
 

Md Ray

Member
Just watched the high quality/bitrate version downloaded from digitalfoundry.net and my god the difference and quality jump over the YT version is staggering. Every tiny little detail and those screen-filling particle effects stand out like you're seeing the actual PS5 version in person. YT quality really doesn't do the game justice, especially for a game like this with fast-moving imagery. Compression artifacts get in the way, unfortunately.

What an excellent-looking and performing game IG has put out once again.
 
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VFXVeteran

Banned
what a lot of people are not realizing is that the cartoony and stylized nature of Rift Apart is what’s driving this.

Because environment and objects are so stylized
. You don’t need high resolution textures. For example the stylized rocks in some of the environment only need 512x512 textures.

For a game focused on photorealistic (most games) this wouldn’t fly. The rock especially next gen would need 4K-8k textures and no less than 2k. Unless the rock would be a blurry mess. The geometry data would also be orders of magnitude more

Some of Rift Apart environment and objects would even only need a 1x1 texture (1kb). Because the stylized nature means you can use simple base color textures with a single generic scratch/decay diffuse and normal texture.

I wouldn’t be shocked if hundreds of objects were sharing just acouple textures. I would also be shocked if environment/ environment objects had textures above 512x512 or 1024x1024.
This is different to UE5 Valley of the ancient for example, where you need tens of GBs of texture data because you are using 4K-8k textures for all objects just for two worlds.
Absolutely 100%. You get a prize! R&C has extremely well done artistic presentation but when you look at close inspection, it's pretty lightweight on the rendering aspects which is why it performs so well.
 
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IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
This is different to UE5 Valley of the ancient for example, where you need tens of GBs of texture data because you are using 4K-8k textures for all objects just for two worlds.

Less than 15GB (as we know the geometry was somewhere around 6GB) is a bit of a stretch to call "10s of gigabytes" ;)

But if it was a game the size of Ratchet it certainly would be.

The fact Ratchet is only 33GB should tell people that it can't really be utilizing THAT MUCH I/O. Unless the game only has a handful of asset sets, or it's an incredibly small game.

It's not replacing the entirety of memory; it's loading in what is needed for the new asset set (even taking into account compression)... likely relying on a ton of shared assets.. IMO.. I'd love to see an actual I/O counter on screen.

If it is, then it's just not very many different sets of assets in the entire game.. which I guess is possible. If it takes ~5GB of disk stored assets to replace the ~13GB of RAM (taking into account compression).. well.. you get the picture.
 
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ABnormal

Member
It's not instant like the medium, it is very fast though.
No, the point is that there's no loading in The medium, it's already all in ram, both worlds.
what a lot of people are not realizing is that the cartoony and stylized nature of Rift Apart is what’s driving this.

Because environment and objects are so stylized. You don’t need high resolution textures. For example the stylized rocks in some of the environment only need 512x512 textures.

For a game focused on photorealistic (most games) this wouldn’t fly. The rock especially next gen would need 4K-8k textures and no less than 2k. Unless the rock would be a blurry mess. The geometry data would also be orders of magnitude more

Some of Rift Apart environment and objects would even only need a 1x1 texture (1kb). Because the stylized nature means you can use simple base color textures with a single generic scratch/decay diffuse and normal texture.

I wouldn’t be shocked if hundreds of objects were sharing just acouple textures. I would also be shocked if environment/ environment objects had textures above 512x512 or 1024x1024.
This is different to UE5 Valley of the ancient for example, where you need tens of GBs of texture data because you are using 4K-8k textures for all objects just for two worlds.
Not sure from where you have taken those numbers, but developers themselves stated that ram is completely filled in the time of those warps. Being partial of entire levels, or textures, or other, that's the amount of data moved around.
 

CamHostage

Member
As someone who get annoyed when I notice low detail ammo case this kind of details made me happy.

That looks a lot like Unreal's Nanite tech (which is why the PS5 has this SSD).... Pretty impressive stuff!

I think it's more just about material shaders than anything like Nanite.

Drawing a cylinder with a disc on the end and a firing-pin texture for shell casings, that's all pretty easy and basic shapes (and once you have one shell in memory, every other shell is the same as the last one... unless they did like crush or a unique stamp for the metal scorch.)

T1QWzs1.jpg


What's different now is that, besides having the latitude to go into deeper levels of depth with multiple rings and whatever that rectangle on top is, a modern game engine is being told, "This is plastic, this is copper, this is polished, this is rough metal." That shell model has the metal portions marked as being "made of copper", and rendered based on an understanding of how real copper looks in that light. Same for the plastic. Then a burn stamp is put on the plastic (which maybe the game knows about too? I'm assuming the burn and the bubbling on the plastic are placed there as basic stamps, but maybe they include some randomness of burn+bubbles in the calculations of the model?)

Also, it does maintain a very rounded model (sometimes cylinders and circles look like trapezoids when you get too close,) but especially in a photo mode like this, you can keep calculating the triangles that make up the rounded shape to hide the edges. So in that way, you're right, it's like Nanite in that it's subdividing the shape as fast as you can look at it from different angles and distances to show you the detailed lines/curves of the surface, but this is an extremely simple cylinder shape, so the math is of course much easier to describe than say a rock or a statue.

Put it together and your mostly-simple pipe shape looks like a super detailed and realistic shell casing, with rounded edges that stay round and a "Copper" PBR model that efficiently gets used throughout the game where that type of metal is used. A designer didn't have to spend hours on this shell casing and check with the engineering team to see if they had space in memory for this amount of detail in spent bullets; that designer could use materials and common shapes that the game understands, and in a matter of minutes, there's a good-looking shell casing in the game.

(*This is a really good and detailed shell here, but R&C Rift Apart has a photo mode, so it lets you see the models up close and fully detailed. I bet if you could zoom in with other games, there's probably some good shells and casings out there waiting to be discovered.)
 
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ABnormal

Member
Ain't talking about streaming Mr. ABonermal, just showing the game isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before as some here truly seem to think this portal thing is some new next-gen thingy. Doesn't matter if its on RAM or not.

We'll talk again once we actually have a game where you jump between 10 different worlds whenever you want.
You are seriously confused about how these processes work. "Doesn't matter if it's on ram or not". Are you serious? That's exactly the point.

And in this game you can already jump from any of its worlds to the others.

It's just that you either are not interested to understand how it works, or it's simply denial for some misterious reason.
 
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CuNi

Member
I don't own a PS5 nor was I ever a big fan of R&C, but they really delivered another great game there! Hope all of you that bought it have a hell of a fun time with it!
I'm more happy about "next-gen" slowly truly kicking in, especially with that "movie" experience (ie. no loading screens, seamless transitions from cutscenes into gameplay etc.).

Imagine a Star Wars game like Battlefront that is fully action packed, with some story mode and cinematic cutscenes between levels/missions...
Kudos to the devs and to both next gen consoles for pushing faster I/O Speeds!

On a Side note, I don't know all games in existence, but for me it feels like this is the first time that a game got a "upgrade" since the reveal trailer instead of the usual "downgrade".
That's a first for me to see not gonna lie!
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
I think it's more just about material shaders.

Drawing a cylinder with a disc on the end and a firing-pin texture for shell casings, that's all pretty easy and basic shapes (and once you have one shell in memory, every other shell is the same as the last one... unless they did like crush or a unique stamp for the metal scorch.)

T1QWzs1.jpg


What's different now is that, besides having the latitude to go into deeper levels of depth with multiple rings and whatever that rectangle on top is, a modern game engine is being told, "This is plastic, this is copper, this is polished, this is rough metal." That shell model has the metal portions marked as being "made of copper", and rendered based on an understanding of how real copper looks in that light. Same for the plastic. Then a burn stamp is put on the plastic (which maybe the game knows about too? I'm assuming the burn and the bubbling on the plastic are placed there as basic stamps, but maybe they include some randomness of burn+bubbles in the calculations of the model?) and your mostly-simple shape pipe-shape looks like a super detailed and realistic shell casing, using a "Copper" PBR model that efficiently gets used throughout the game where that type of metal is used.

(*This is a really good and detailed shell here, but R&C Rift Apart has a photo mode, so it lets you see the models up close and fully detailed. I bet if you could zoom in with other games, there's probably some good shells and casings out there waiting to be discovered.)
I'm impressed with how round it is for such a little item in the game.
 

Great Hair

Banned
Here's, Prey - 2006 game.


Time we stop drinking big corp kool aid and look at reality for a bit
a new Open World
an impressive draw distance
with 1,000 stationary, moving objects, some with hairy legs
loading time = under 2s
vs
a narrow corridor with few pipes
no draw distance and 1 enemy shooting
loading time = too long, they had to cut the clip

bud GIF
 
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Md Ray

Member
Very impressive for a 9TF RDNA1.5 console :messenger_beaming:
Series are the only RDNA 2 consoles they said.

But so far it's only the RDNA 1.5 console showing and actually delivering the good stuff. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

issa joke, calm down. Series consoles will show their strengths too eventually.
 
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Damn, so it turned out to be a really good game and the graphical showcase it was promised to be. Really great stuff indeed.
And it really shows the lenghts some warriors on twitter and other places will go to downplay this game, that's the sad part.
 
Ive said this for years till its tyring to keep saying it, there are no studios out there that are artistically and technically wizards as playstation studios. This game proves this point again as all other playstation titles before, the use of lighting, raytracing, geometric detail, art direction is just above anything that came before.

This game was pre maturely dissected when it was a work in progress and pundits said it used low res reflections and what not while the full release uses high quality raytraced reflections and all the bells and whistels + a 60hz mode for those fps fanatics. This is why we say console games are far more optimised than pc games.

And also when i day production quality this is what i mean. You dont just throw a quadrillion rays on a scene and pray to gods your graphics look better no that isnt art, raytracing only looks better if your artistic direction allows it to. So all those hyped garbage like metro, control, cyberpunk dont hold any candle to this game even comparing them is lunacy. This is what a quality production looks like from film quality character models, world detail, good use of io technology to blend with the games design, good use of raytracing, and artistic design. This is a work of art not just mathematics.
 
Of couse, if you have a level in ram, you can warp every frame, if you want :messenger_grinning_sweat:

That's possible since... every device that had ram, but it's not a merit and it's not even comparable. They are two different things.
I know but you said this
On the other hand, in R&C every level is instantly loaded from sdd, so you can have all the detail you want.
I'm just saying it's not instant.
They are doing different things in a different way.
 

KAL2006

Banned
After watching this it makes me sad about God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo 7. Think of what could have been, now I have to wait another 5-6 years for a next gen only Horizon, God of War and Gran Turismo.
 

CamHostage

Member
I'm impressed with how round it is for such a little item in the game.
I edited my post to talk a little bit about "roundness", but I don't think we have as much a problem with perfectly-round shapes anymore? Even Super Mario Odyssey has pipes you don't see edges on, and that's on the little Switch. The texturing and the shading/lighting help hide some edges sometimes too. Especially objects like these that don't need much texture to them (though PBR itself is a texture, or rather a layer of textures and material data,) you can just say, hey game engine, this is a circle, know what a circle is and make me proud when you draw it...

This particular shell casing is being viewed in a Photo Mode, too. The game engine can take the time to show that shape as perfect as it can get it (I also assume the Photo Mode goes and gets the highest level of detail models it can when you bring the camera that close.) In action at full speed, it ain't got that kind of time! The game only gives so much time to drawing perfectly round shapes, and you get edges on things that the game doesn't care about enough to spend a lot of time or memory to do perfectly. To steal from a VFXVeteran post, even Rift Apart exclusively made for the mighty PS5 has to settle for some rough edges...

5JNsZHJ.png
 
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ABnormal

Member
I know but you said this

I'm just saying it's not instant.
They are doing different things in a different way.
Well, by "instantly" I didn't mean within a frame. But it takes how much, one second? For example using the cristals. Since you change step into an entire new level (as stated by the developer), it would not be a stretch calling it "intantaneous". It would be useful to know how much memory is moved at every time, just to know the average streaming speed.
But yes, there are situations where you can see that they are keeping two levels at a time in ram (for example, when you can walk back and forth between them; probably using only those portions of areas). In other situations, on the contrary, levels are entirly different and open, traversable and playable in a totally different way.
Maybe during gdc they will disclose more about the tech.
 

JTCx

Member
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

Cool downplay, but this isnt going to stop the pixar5. Its best to bump that coil whine thread.
 

jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
Differences between Performance RT and Fidelity mode. This is from one of the reviewers, YongYea:


Differences are rather small (to my eyes, maybe you'll spot more differences ;))

xdweyIz.jpg

I think it will vary from scene to scene...but yeah, ,this doesnt look that bad. I will be doing alot of flipping back n forth Friday, lol.
a new Open World
an impressive draw distance
with 1,000 stationary, moving objects, some with hairy legs
loading time = under 2s
vs
a narrow corridor with few pipes
no draw distance and 1 enemy shooting
loading time = too long, they had to cut the clip

bud GIF
Now here is when some will try to downplay this and pretend all games are made the same. Already seen one post talking about how the art style gives it an advantage for something.....

Its almost like ppl wanting 60fps, 120fps and native 4K and not expecting a hit in visuals.

The density of whats going on in Rift Apart should be enough to stop the downplaying...but naw....
 
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Md Ray

Member
The one thing that just sticks out to me with everything looking so awesome - what is up with the fire? Like there is a section with a bunch of fire that looks like ps3 level fire, how are we not beyond that at this point in games? Small nitpick, just annoys me how those type of effects seemingly don’t improve much over the years. Performance RT mode looks great!
It's stylized here. Look at the fire in Spider-Man, it looks better and it's a PS4 game.
 

Tygeezy

Member
fidelity mode is the way to go , performance RT mode is the second best choice , performance only mode seems a bit pointless imo
Fidelity mode is not the way to go if you prefer more frames, less motion blur, and less input latency. You may have a point about standard performance mode, but it's always good to have options.
 
Well, by "instantly" I didn't mean within a frame. But it takes how much, one second? For example using the cristals. Since you change step into an entire new level (as stated by the developer), it would not be a stretch calling it "intantaneous". It would be useful to know how much memory is moved at every time, just to know the average streaming speed.
But yes, there are situations where you can see that they are keeping two levels at a time in ram (for example, when you can walk back and forth between them; probably using only those portions of areas). In other situations, on the contrary, levels are entirly different and open, traversable and playable in a totally different way.
Maybe during gdc they will disclose more about the tech.
See if you compare 1 second to say 5 second or 10 seconds I can see you calling it instant. Comparing a second (Ratchet) to a frame(the medium) I don't think you can call it instant. That would make the medium 30 times faster than instant, and that just sounds weird.
It would be awesome if they talked more and gave more specifics. In these forums it's anywhere from basically 0 all the way to 12gb/s every second. Game looks and runs great, however much data is moving around.
 

Tygeezy

Member
Fucking tragedy, isn’t it?

And yet there are folks on this forum who think that GoW being cross gen won’t hold it back at all. Everything can just be easily scaled down.

The Office Reaction GIF
I think a lot of games can be scaled down. The IO performance of the ps5 being used as a gameplay element is where the game can't be cross generational however.
 
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CamHostage

Member
After watching this it makes me sad about God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo 7. Think of what could have been, now I have to wait another 5-6 years for a next gen only Horizon, God of War and Gran Turismo.

Don't be sad. R&C is built using the same technology of the cross-gen Spider-Man MIles Morales. (DF even talks about how they're using familiar visual techniques that MM introduced, and that you can also see some of the minor hitches in the engine that are the same because the tech is shared.) It's not a cross-gen game because you can't do those fast-loading levels/tricks, but if that wasn't the gameplay conceit, possibly Rift Apart could have been ported down with the same downscaling loss of detail and complexity as Miles. Luckily, they didn't have to try.

The power of PS5 helps, of course, but exclusivity isn't what makes this awesome. It's a lot of hard work on a good engine by smart people. Next gen will continue to evolve, and we'll get to the point where products like Rift Apart distance themselves impossibly away from old gen, but the technology is taking a bit longer to get there then it has in consoles of the past, and it's not just cross-gen releases from either Sony or MS that's holding it back.
 
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It's stylized here. Look at the fire in Spider-Man, it looks better and it's a PS4 game.
Yeah I see that I just feel like water/fire really has not advanced with the rest of graphics in the way it looks and behaves in general - it takes away from the overall thing. Still hoping for that deep down level fire at some point
 

DiscoDave

Member
Just watched the video seems obviously impressed and its just nuts how good this looks and it will be the first R&C game I play.
 
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