The upcoming PC port of Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart specifications were released today ahead of the release later this month on July 26th.

The specs are interesting, to say the least.  This news came from VGC on Twitter, who revealed that the previous PlayStation 5 exclusive won’t be requiring an SSD (Solid State Drive) when it releases later in the month.  Further confirming this, Notebook Check’s Anil Ganti confirms, “Nixxes and Insomniac games have revealed the PC system requirements for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. The game can run on mechanical hard drives thanks to DirectStorage 1.2 support, although one needs reasonably beefy hardware to play the game at 4K with raytracing.”

The system specs range from minimum to ultimate ray trancing, with the minimum being the bare-bone requirements, literally. One can get away playing Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart  at very low settings at 720p 30fps, running an Intel Core I3-8100/Ryzen 3 3100 with either Nvidia’s GTX 960 or AMD RX470 with 8GBs of RAM and “75 gbs HDD space (SSD Recommended).”  Going up through the system specs, its more demanding as you introduce ray tracing with “Ultimate Ray Tracing” requiring the latest hardware with 32GBs of RAM. The medium recommended specs for 1080p 60FPS is an Intel Core i5-8400/Ryzen 5 3600 with Nvidia’s RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 5700 and 16 GB of RAM.

When Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was first revealed, Marcus Smith of Insomniac explains that without the PlayStation 5’s SSD, the rift mechanic wouldn’t have been possible and stating “The SSD is screamingly fast. It allows us to build worlds and project players from one place to another in near instantaneous speeds.”  Kingston Technologies explains that “SSDs are 35 to 100 times faster than HDDs. What does this mean for gamers? A machine that has superior performance because of its faster boot times, data movement, and higher bandwidth. Additionally, faster speeds mean SSDs can handle data at the ultra-high speeds necessary in today’s gaming world.”

The reception for this on game news accounts on Twitter has been interesting, with a lot of gamers surprised to see the game run on an HDD abide at a lower resolution.  Some even pointed out the marketing talk of the game only being playable on an SSD.  Regardless, it’s still surprising to see an HDD being included in system specs, but it is still strongly recommended to play with an SSD for the best experience.