Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is widely praised overall, however, technical issues have impacted certain players’ enjoyment. Let’s explore the major bugs reported so far, along with tips to avoid or minimize them. With the right fixes and workarounds, PC gamers can smoothly experience Ratchet and Clank’s exhilarating journey through alien dimensions.
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Frequent Crashes Interrupt Gameplay
One of the most disruptive bugs is random crashes during gameplay. Users describe the game abruptly closing without warning or error message. Crashes often occur after changing graphics settings or during scene transitions. But they can happen unpredictably even mid-session.
Crash frequency varies between systems. Some users hardly experience them, while others face crashes every 10-15 minutes. This makes smooth progression difficult.
Unfortunately no clear fix is available currently. The crashes likely originate from bugs in the game code itself. Players can only hope the developers address the issue in a future patch. Be sure to save often so progress isn’t lost if a crash occurs.
AMD GPU Users Face Broken Graphics
Users running Rift Apart on AMD Radeon Vega graphics cards face critical visual issues. Characters, vehicles, and objects fail to render properly, appearing fully or partially invisible. Environments also exhibit artifacting, flickering, and other graphical corruption.
This renders the game essentially unplayable for affected AMD users. Nixxes, the studio handling the PC port, has confirmed they’re investigating the AMD-specific bugs. Workarounds involve switching to an Nvidia GPU or waiting for fixes from the developers and updated AMD drivers.
Texture Pop-In Issue
Another immersion-breaking issue is noticeable texture pop-in during gameplay, not just after loading screens. Even high-end PCs with plentiful VRAM see character models and environmental objects briefly appear blurry or low-res. Their detailed textures load in seconds later.
This suggests the game is struggling to stream in full-resolution textures efficiently, even on beefy systems. Insomniac’s Spider-Man ports on PC exhibit similar texture streaming problems. Unfortunately no available settings adjustments or mods improve this behavior yet.
Tweaking Reflections Spawns Artifacts
Users report visual artifacts like flickering and black splotches appearing in water reflections. This primarily occurs when toggling ray tracing reflection settings, but can also arise from changing ambient occlusion modes.
The flickering specifically seems tied to ambient occlusion methods other than SSAO. Switching to SSAO can help stabilize water reflections. Disabling ray traced reflections also avoids the artifacts, but removes the enhanced visuals.
Luckily the black splotches resolve themselves after reloading the area. So they appear to be a temporary rendering hitch when settings change. Tweaking options inside gameplay rather than menus prevents the immersion-breaking glitches.
Related: Best Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Settings for FPS Boost
High Framerates Distort Physics – July 27, 2023
Higher framerates are usually welcome for smoother gameplay. But in Rift Apart, some animations and physics behave erratically above 60fps. Destruction and ragdoll effects when destroying crates or defeating enemies playback far quicker than intended.
This resembles an issue in Spider-Man Remastered where high fps broke animations. Capping the framerate at 60fps using external tools restores proper physics timing and prevents distracting distortion. Support for uncapped framerates needs engine-level fixes.
Launcher Conflicts with Display Scaling
A niche issue arises specifically when adjusting settings in the game launcher. On multi-monitor or high DPI setups, the launcher window can scale larger than the actual display resolution. This makes its options impossible to access or apply.
Users with mismatched monitors or custom display scaling are most vulnerable to this UI bug. A workaround is to skip the launcher and configure settings only via the in-game menus. The developers are investigating a permanent fix.
Freezing When Exiting Game
A few reports mention the game freezing entirely on exit, requiring forced rebooting of the PC. The issue stems from having Nvidia Resizable BAR enabled globally. Rift Apart doesn’t officially support the performance-enhancing tech yet.
Using Nvidia Inspector to disable Resizable BAR prevents system lockups when quitting the game. BAR compatibility will hopefully come via future game or driver updates.
Out of Memory Crashes
Some users experience abrupt crashes with out of memory errors. This can occur if your Windows page file size is set incorrectly. By default, Windows manages the page file size automatically as needed.
But manually configuring a fixed page file that’s too small deprives applications of vital virtual memory. Restoring default page file management in System Properties prevents artificial limits that trigger crashes.
