DirectStorage Bug Drops Frame Rates in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

Aaron Klotz
·2 min read
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

ComputerBase revealed that Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is suffering from a serious performance bug that is tanking performance on GeForce RTX hardware. The culprit is a bug related to DirectStorage, where deleting the game's DirectStorage DLL files will significantly improve the game's performance on team green's best graphics cards. Thankfully, the issue does not affect AMD Radeon GPUs; ComputerBase reports that Intel Arc GPUs could be affected, though they did not test any Arc GPUs.

In testing with an RTX 4080 at 4K, ComputerBase found that deleting the game's "dstorage.dll" and "dstoragecore.dll" files resulted in 10% higher frame rates, starting from 118.6 FPS with the game in its original state, and boosting to 129.7 FPS after the files were removed. The 1% percentile frame rates were even more sensitive, improving by a whopping 26% after executing the same modifications. The game minimum fps was 85 in its original state, increasing to 107.4 FPS after the DirectStorage files were deleted.

The German outlet also tested an RX 7900 XTX and found that the AMD GPU did not suffer from the same problems. Removing the files only improved performance by 1% which is well within margin of error.

Going back to GeForce users, the DirectStorage issues go beyond the GPUs performance problems. Apparently, the game's performance on GeForce hardware is also affected by the SSD speed when leaving the DirectStorage files intact. ComputerBase's RTX 4080 ran the game slower on a SATA-based SSD compared to running the game on a faster NVMe drive.

But the most bizarre issue with the DirectStorage files is that they don't appear to do anything of value, and removing them does not result in any issues. ComputerBase reports that removing the files does not slow down storage-demanding aspects of the game, but in fact improves load times and asset streaming performance. Rift jumps, for instance, are smoother on RTX hardware and load slightly quicker with the DirectStorage files gone.

It's difficult to say what's going on here, but there's clearly a serious bug surrounding Nixxes' DirectStorage implementation in Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart that is hampering performance on GeForce hardware. Given the game is supposed to use RTX IO, an Nvidia-tuned variant of DirectStorage, it's possible there are RTX-specific extras that are taking away from GPU compute time in order to decompress assets. Even so, a 10% or larger drop in frame rates definitely shouldn't be part of the package.

Nixxes has not announced a fix at this time, but we expect one to come out once knowledge of the issue spreads.