'Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart' takes the PS5 to new heights | Engadget

On the PS5, though, Rift Apart feels like a genuine leap ahead.The game puts the series' heroes, the plucky Lombax Ratchet and his robotic sidekick Clank, on a dimension-hopping quest where they encounter alternative versions of themselves. In its 4K/30fps "Fidelity" and lower-res/60fps "Performance RT" graphics modes, Rift Apart uses ray traced reflections that makes surfaces look almost life-like. A sleek floor in a shopping mall, for example, can accurately reflect the enemies and psychedelic lighting effects right above it.According to Mike Fitzgerald, Core Technology Director at Insomniac Games, the studio realized early on that reflections were a major differentiator from the PlayStation 4: "There's tons of curved glass surfaces, futuristic metal places, and spaceship concepts where [ray traced reflections] were adding so much, that we decided to say, 'Hey, let's use as much of that power as we can specifically for reflections.'"You can see the difference immediately in Rift Apart's "Performance" mode, which forgoes ray tracing in exchange for higher-resolution rendering at 60fps. (The latter is particularly astounding, since the PS5's memory has to hold everything you can see in those wipes at the same time.)Much like the pack-in game Astro's Playroom, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart uses every aspect of Sony's DualSense controller wisely.