Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.1, a user-friendly feature GPU to speed up load times, just tested with a comparison between AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics cards – with some very interesting results. In short, the feature seems set to seriously increase load times with NVMe SSDs.
Like Tom’s Hardware (opens in a new tab) report, Compusemble (opens in a new tab) developed a benchmark test that the German technology site PC game hardware (opens in a new tab) (PCGH) was used to generate results for AMD’s RX 7900 XT pitted against Intel’s Arc A770 and Nvidia’s RTX 4080.
All GPUs have been tested on PCs with Intel’s Core i9-12900K (Alder Lake flagship CPU) under conditions 11 . window.
First of all, a quick tech reminder to refresh your memory if needed: DirectStorage 1.1 comes with GPU decompression technology, so the GPU can handle the decompression (compressed game assets). ) and does this with much more speed and efficiency than the CPU.
This opens up faster load times and faster content loading on the go in large open-world games, meaning a smoother experience when wandering around in those kinds of vast environments.
In testing, PCGH found that Intel’s A770 GPU is indeed the top performer in terms of game content decompression speed, reaching 16.8GB/s compared to 15.3GB/s of RTX4080and 14.6GB/s for AMD’s 7900XT (for the PCIe 4.0 test – although Intel also leads in PCI 3.0, albeit by a slightly narrower margin).
While it’s an eye-opening win for Intel Arc, it’s important to note that it doesn’t result in any real difference in load times between GPUs, with all of them being the same. guarantee extremely fast speed.
PCGH has seen 5-second load times drop to 0.5 seconds – essentially a blink of an eye – in any case for these AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics cards, so it’s all good. completely consistent with the actual end result.
Analysis: Really impressive results – but where is the game?
This is an interesting first look at independent benchmarks showing how fast DirectStorage will be for PC gamers, no matter what type of (contemporary) GPU they’re using. Note that gamers need NVMe SSDand also, run Windows 11 for best results.
While DirectStorage will work with PCs running Windows 10, there are a lot of optimizations for Windows 11 in terms of storage, which means it should enhance it even more. So it’s easy to see why, given how much DirectStorage influenced this test, it would be a compelling argument for PC gamers to upgrade to Windows 11.
Mind you, that may not be a real-world applicable argument for some time to come, simply because no game uses DirectStorage yet (not on PC anyway). The only game we know of coming out and featuring DS support is tell firstand disappointingly, this has fallen victim to multiple delays.
Forspoken was slated for May 2022, then delayed to October 2022, before pushed to January 24, 2023, which is just over a week away. So hopefully – except for any last minute delays – we’ll see DirectStorage in action on PC soon.
Even so, a PC games It’s just a drop in the ocean, and it’s unclear when the next titles using this speedy SSD boost technology will actually appear. That means it will be quite a while before PC gamers stick to Windows 10 feel any real incentive to upgrade to Windows 11, but judging from the initial testing so far, it seems like That pull will be a significant drag when it does appear. Phat.
