All of which leads us onto one of the more inane discussion points we've seen:
The fact that the game runs on slower machines with no SSD when Insomniac claimed that the SSD was essential
for the game they'd created.
First of all,
the difference between the console experience and the 'very low' setting is frankly immense in terms of data transfer.
Secondly, the comment was likely made in relation to the other development platform available to them, the PlayStation 4.
In the video you'll witness the carnage of what happens when you try to run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on a launch PS4 512GB HDD
- even the very low setting doesn't work and the game eventually crashes.
The point is that
to make the game work across as many PCs as possible, Nixxes did what Insomniac did not need to:
Necessarily, they scaled the game by introducing quality presets and in common with Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, that includes increasing fidelity for higher-end systems and reducing it where needed.
Nixxes uses the GPU-accelerated DirectStorage 1.2 as its API of choice for handling
the task of replicating PlayStation 5's storage strengths, but there has been some confusion
about how it is deployed in the wake of reported comments describing how it's only used on higher graphical settings,
the implication being that lower settings use the CPU instead.
Having talked to Nixxes about it, the reality is that both CPU and GPU decompression are used on different classes of assets.
So, larger assets such as textures are in the GDeflate format and they all decompressed using the GPU, without exception.
Smaller assets, like some models and very small textures (at the end of the mip chain) are compressed
with LZ4 and decompress on the CPU instead.
The end result is a scalable system that works across a range of PC set-ups and can even operate on a hard drive too -
albeit with notable pauses on the portal jumps.