How to improve FPS in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PC)
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart arrived on PC in 2023 as one of Insomniac Games' best-cared-for ports, inheriting from PS5 its instant interdimensional rift tech, full ray tracing, and an art direction packed with color and detail. It's a game that demands a lot from the GPU in ray tracing and VRAM due to the number of unique assets coexisting across each dimension, but it also knows how to scale down well if you touch the right settings. The real bottleneck isn't just in the shaders: the ultra-fast texture streaming during rifts depends on having an SSD, it's not optional. In this analysis we look at what to tweak to keep FPS stable even in fights with the most particles and sharp camera changes, without losing the game's visual identity.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +38% free FPS.
Ray Tracing Reflections
Ray-traced reflections are among Insomniac's engine's most expensive features, especially in the metallic and watery environments of Sargasso or Blizar Prime. Disabling them frees up a notable amount of performance on mid-range GPUs without the game losing visual readability, since native screen-space reflections (SSR) stay active.
Ray Tracing Shadows
Ray-traced shadows add realistic contact between Ratchet, Rivet, and dense vegetation environments, but their cost doesn't pay off in most configurations. The game's rasterized shadows are already high quality and practically indistinguishable in motion during combat.
Motion Blur
With the fast camera movements generated by multi-weapon combat and instant rifts, motion blur adds a blur layer that makes tracking enemies harder. The performance impact is low, but it gets disabled almost universally for visual clarity.
Chromatic Aberration
It's a purely cosmetic effect that distorts image edges, and many players find it annoying during long sessions. It doesn't provide any relevant performance gain, but it's included in any settings list purely for visual preference and image sharpness.
Depth of Field
Depth of field is used in many cutscenes and in the automatic focus toward distant enemies, but during active gameplay it can blur parts of the screen mid-firefight. Disabling it gives a slight performance boost and better clarity when spotting threats at the edges of the frame.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Dropping from Very High/Ultra to High frees up a considerable amount of VRAM without much noticeable sharpness loss, something critical given that this game loads unique textures for every dimension visited. On cards with 8GB or less of VRAM this is the setting that most often prevents stuttering from memory saturation.
Level of Detail
LOD controls the distance at which models load in full detail, something especially demanding in colorful open areas like Torren IV. Lowering it to Medium reduces geometry load without noticeably affecting nearby enemies and objects, which are what really matters in combat.
Shadow Quality
High-resolution rasterized shadows consume a fair amount of GPU bandwidth, especially in scenes with multiple dynamic light sources and weapon particles. Lowering to Medium keeps soft, coherent shadows without the cost of Ultra resolutions, which are hard to appreciate during fast gameplay.
Level of Detail (Model Detail)
Separate from environment LOD, character and enemy model detail can be adjusted on its own. Keeping it on High preserves the quality of Insomniac's character designs on the protagonists while trimming some cost on secondary NPCs and background enemies during combat waves.
Ray Tracing Reflections Quality
For those who want to keep ray tracing active for its visual impact on metallic weapon and ship reflections, lowering the quality from Ultra to Medium reduces cost notably while keeping the overall effect recognizable. It's the middle ground between disabling it entirely and paying the full Ultra price.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 3 (includes Frame Generation)
+55% FPSDLSS 3 with Frame Generation is supported on RTX 40 GPUs, generating intermediate frames to nearly double perceived framerate in scenes with ray tracing active. In Quality mode it offers the game's best sharpness/performance ratio, especially useful for absorbing the cost of ray-traced reflections and shadows.
AMD FSR 2
+35% FPSFSR 2 works on any compatible GPU, not just AMD, and offers solid image reconstruction in Quality mode, though with somewhat more noticeable ghosting during instant rifts and fast combat than the proprietary alternatives.
Intel XeSS
+30% FPSXeSS is a valid option especially on Arc, but also usable on GPUs from other brands, with image quality between DLSS and FSR 2. It's the least-used of the three options in this game, though it performs well at 1440p and above.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable DLSS 3 with Frame Generation on RTX 40 to offset the ray tracing cost without sacrificing native resolution.
- •Use the NVIDIA overlay or MSI Afterburner to watch VRAM usage: above 8GB with Texture Quality on Ultra, stuttering appears quickly.
- •Install the latest Game Ready drivers before playing; Rift Apart received several RTX-specific performance patches in its first months after the PC launch.
AMD
- •Enable Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) in the BIOS; the game benefits measurably during rift sequences thanks to faster video memory access.
- •On RDNA2/RDNA3 GPUs without efficient dedicated RT support, disable both ray tracing options and rely on FSR 2 in Quality mode to keep 60 FPS.
- •Update to the latest Adrenalin drivers, since AMD has published optimizations specific to Insomniac's engine after launch.
Sistema
- •An SSD is mandatory, not optional: without one, interdimensional jump sequences suffer severe stuttering or even real-time texture-loading failures.
- •Have at least 16GB of RAM; with 8GB the game resorts to virtual memory during asset streaming and the impact on frametimes is very noticeable.
- •Close background applications using the SSD (cloud sync, actively scanning antivirus) so they don't compete with the bandwidth the rift streaming needs.
5. Known game issues
Shader compilation stuttering on first launch
Like other recent ports, Rift Apart compiles shaders the first time it runs, causing microstutters in the first sessions. Insomniac added a precompilation screen at startup, but residual stuttering can reappear when visiting new zones for the first time.
Estado: Day-one patch and later 2023 updates
VRAM usage spikes with high Texture Quality on less than 8GB
On cards with 6GB of VRAM or less, raising texture quality above High causes sharp framerate drops and textures that take time to load after rifts, since the game tries to keep assets from multiple dimensions in memory simultaneously.
Strict SSD requirement to avoid streaming failures
Playing from a mechanical hard drive isn't reliably supported: instant transitions between dimensions can cause unloaded geometry, prolonged low-resolution textures, or even freezes, since the game's design assumes SSD-level read speeds.
6. Frequently asked questions
Is an SSD mandatory to play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC?▾
Is it worth enabling ray tracing in this game?▾
How much VRAM do I need to play with high textures?▾
Which upscaling technology is best, DLSS, FSR, or XeSS?▾
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Calculate FPS for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →