Latest Ratchet & Clank Patch For PC Closes The Radeon Ray-Tracing Rift
It turned out that the issue was down, at least in part, to bugs in the Radeon graphics driver. AMD released a new driver on July 26th that fixed some bugs related to the game, but it took a second driver release, on the third of this month, before AMD was willing to mark down game-specific support for the new title.
Now, Insomniac (or more likely, Nixxes) has patched the game itself to allow ray-tracing on Radeon GPUs just as the original system requirements specified. That's right: before the game launched, Nixxes published this very fancy chart full of system requirements for the game, and the ray-tracing presets listed Radeon GPUs at that time. Those cards were removed from the chart for release, but now they've been replaced in their proper slots.
So saying, if you're keen to enjoy "Amazing Ray-Tracing", you'll want a Radeon RX 6800 XT. Notably, that GPU is significantly faster at raster graphics compared to the GeForce RTX 3070 with which it shares a box, and that's probably down to RDNA 2's relatively-poor efficiency at ray-tracing operations. Meanwhile, for "Ultimate Ray-Tracing", you'll have to go straight to the top with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
Of course, those recommendations are based on 1440p and 4K respectively, both at 60 FPS. If you've got a lower-resolution display, or don't mind making use of FidelityFX Super Resolution, you can surely get away with a less-mighty GPU to push pixels to your monitor. Just make sure you grab the latest AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.10.23.03 driver, as it is absolutely required.
The full patch notes for the update.
Besides the bump to visual quality for red team gamers, this patch also improves the visuals of ray-traced reflections and shadows in the game, resolves a crash that occurred "on legacy CPUs", fixes corrupted waypoint text, nixes UI corruption on AMD and Intel GPUs, addresses that annoying armor list feature where it would jump to the top after picking an item, and includes "various bug fixes, stability improvements, and optimizations."
