Ratchet and Clank is the reboot of the original game that was released on the PlayStation 2. It was praised for its excellent gameplay and visuals that manage to come pretty close to the movie.
Ratchet and Clank is an shooter based platformer which might benefit from a higher frame rate, unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be the case for the PS4 Pro version of the game.
James Stevenson, who is the community manager at Insomniac Games, has explained the reason behind their decision to stick with 30 fps on the PS4 Pro, and he also detailed their technique that they use to render the game at 4K resolution.
“Temporal injection is a different approach ban checkerbording to get to 2160p that gets you AA too. We think it looks better. The game is designed to run at a locked 30 so making frame rate changes was never in the cards. Sorry,” said Stevenson in a post on the gaming forum NeoGAF. “The engine tech was developed on our current stuff first and then we ported it back here.”
When some people considered it a limitation of the engine being used by Insomniac Games, Stevenson was quick to share that it has nothing to do with their engine, which is clearly capable of higher frame rate in games. He also confirmed that some visual effects will be better like Depth of Field effect.
“Yeah, our engine is certainly capable of high framerates (see our Oculus titles at 90) — that said, Ratchet’s utilization and optimization of the PS4 hardware was dialed in for a locked 30, so the effort to re-architect that would be gigantic.”
He further clarified that one of the reason some games are offering options to switch between 30 and 60 fps is because they were clearly built for it from start, like Rise of the Tomb Raider.
“Keep in mind, Ratchet was in development way before PS4 Pro was a thing (or at least, one we knew about). It targeted the original PS4 exclusively and we pushed the system as far as we could. That’s a lot of stuff to unwind to suddenly support multiple resolutions / framerates / set-ups, especially if you’ve using all of the CPU and GPU on the reg PS4.”
So there you have it. While it is possible to run a future Ratchet and Clank game at 60 fps on the PS4 Pro, it won’t be the case for the currently released Ratchet and Clank game. On the plus side, maybe Insomniac Games can now consider a 60 fps mode right from the start for the PS4 Pro hardware while keeping 30 fps for the standard PS4.
