Microsoft has announced that a new version of DirectStorage will hit game developers before the end of 2022 and it will take a major step forward in speeding up load times with SSD.
As you may know, DirectStorage is a feature that first came to Xbox, delivering faster load times – and better game content loading performance in major open world titles – and it Available for the first time on Windows PCs in March.
What Microsoft has now disclosure (cap to Tom’s Hardware) is DirectStorage 1.1, a new version with integrated GPU Decompression technology, coming soon. Although no games have benefited from it yet (yet – we’ll come back to this apparently pretty important point).
Microsoft has told us that DirectStorage (DS) will reduce load times by up to 40% – for games on fast NVMe SSDs running on Windows 11 – and this new piece of the DS, GPU Decompression, will deliver something in the order of three times the load time performance, the company promises.
Normally, the decompression (compressed game content, which needs to be made smaller due to the size) is run by the CPU, but what Microsoft is doing is shifting this hard work directly to the GPU.
“Graphics cards are extremely efficient at parallelizing repetitive tasks, and we can use that capability along with the bandwidth of a high-speed NVMe drive to do more,” explains Microsoft. simultaneous.”
In a Microsoft demo, the company demonstrated that when DirectStorage is running with GPU decompression, compared to traditional CPU decompression, “scenes load almost 3x faster and CPU is almost completely freed up to used for other game processes.” (In that demo, the processor hit only 15% maximum usage, compared to 100% usage when the DS wasn’t in use).
For now, keep in mind that this is a curated and ‘highly optimized’ demo (in Microsoft parlance), but it certainly promises some significant gains overall, which should see the The game supports DirectStorage loading – and running – much smoother -round.
Analysis: Forspoken sadly isn’t coming out (still)
It’s worth noting that even though DirectStorage is made with super-fast NVMe SSDs, it will still work with slower SSDs (and indeed hard disks, at one point); but the effect will not be obvious. Storage acceleration will also work well on Windows 10 machines, but Windows 11 offers advancements in terms of storage optimization, which will again mean the DS delivers more impact. (Also, you need a Contemporary GPUs for the DS to work, that is, the DS has support for DX12 and Shader Model 6).
The main point remains that although work on DirectStorage is going well, there is still no PC Games really tech support. We are supposed to have the first game to introduce the DS this month, Forspoken, but it has been delayed to January 2023 (and had been reset before, so that was a bit of a letdown).
That said, it’s still only a few months away – assuming no further hiccups – but even then, it’s just a game. It will certainly be a while before wider support is accepted among PC game developers, but when it does, it could become a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 11 for gamers (and also a good reason to buy an NVMe SSD for those who haven’t yet made the leap on the storage front).
