Ready to put that pricey NVMe SSD to even better use? Good, as Microsoft has finally launched its DirectStorage API for PC, ushering in an exciting new era of Windows games that feature faster loading times and more detailed worlds courtesy of the latest advancements in the storage space. Contrary to initial plans, DirectStorage is compatible with both Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices, although Microsoft has been quick to recommend the latter for its newer optimizations and broader hardware support. Square Enix’s Forspoken is one of the first PC games that will benefit from DirectStorage.
DirectStorage API Now Available on PC (Microsoft)
- Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage. This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games by allowing developers to more fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices.
- While you may see benefits on any kind of storage device, installing games to an NVMe SSD will maximize your IO performance and help you more fully experience the benefits of DirectStorage.
- This release of DirectStorage provides developers everything they need to move to a new model of IO for their games, and we’re working on even more ways to offload work from the CPU. GPU decompression is next on our roadmap, a feature that will give developers more control over resources and how hardware is leveraged.
DirectStorage is coming to PC (Microsoft)
- In order to be used by the CPU or GPU, [assets] must first be decompressed. A game can pull as much data off the disk as it wants, but you still need an efficient way to decompress and get it to the GPU for rendering. By using DirectStorage, your games are able to leverage the best current and upcoming decompression technologies.
- In a world where a game knows it needs to load and decompress thousands of blocks for the next frame, the one-at-a-time model results in loss of efficiency at various points in the data block’s journey. The DirectStorage API is architected in a way that takes all this into account and maximizes performance throughout the entire pipeline from NVMe drive all the way to the GPU.
- It does this in several ways: by reducing per-request NVMe overhead, enabling batched many-at-a-time parallel IO requests which can be efficiently fed to the GPU, and giving games finer grain control over when they get notified of IO request completion instead of having to react to every tiny IO completion.
- In this way, developers are given an extremely efficient way to submit/handle many orders of magnitude more IO requests than ever before ultimately minimizing the time you wait to get in game, and bringing you larger, more detailed virtual worlds that load in as fast as your game character can move through it.
Discussion (8 replies)
Join Discussion →Would love to see some titles get patches to help this.
This was the only interesting part about the Win11 launch.
Well, the article does say it can work in 10, although states 11 will have better results, so I'll be very interested in seeing this pop up in something soon. I'm especially curious to see if it improves PCIe 4.0 load times.
I was due for a new build when I did my x570 build and already knew that games were not showing that much improvement with PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives but I still went ahead and got one. The benches are fine but just like reviews said, games only load marginally faster than 3.0. Here's hoping this changes that at some point.
I did the same thing.
Let's see... number of games with support:
I hear Forsaken might support it, but it just got pushed back until September, and it's supposed to be another S/E $70 PC release. So ... yeah. Hooray for this I guess?
Yea I just refreshed my own build from my R9 3900x (now sitting in it's old motherboard with old case and PCIE 3.x NVME Drive. Figured I was refreshing might as well double my storage capacity and go PCIE 4.x. I do like the 980 pro (w heatsink). But tangible benefit is questionable.
I've been waiting for features that will make the transition to Win 11 worth it.
We aren't quite there yet, but this is starting to get close.
My only issue is that once again here is a new technology that requires developers to support it in the game. It isn't just an automatic thing. And we know how they like to take shortcuts and save time/money. If this is similar to how it works in the XBOX then maybe developing it with the console in mind will translate easily to the PC? That's the only way it'll probably proliferate on the PC.
So as it is now, we have to wait to see how individual games utilize it, as it is game-based, and other games just won't benefit. If only a handful of games utilize it, then what's the point. So I guess time will tell how ubiquitous this becomes.
I'm also all ears for suggestions on how to benchmark this. I'd love to show the advantages, the hardest part will be consistency. I'm also not sure if the feature can be toggled on or off, or if it's just "on" the whole time regardless. No idea how it will be implemented and enabled.
Feels like a game under windows to game under your Linux flavor of choice comparison will be needed.