Intel Arc A770 GPUs appear to be particularly good for DirectStorage, the new API from Microsoft that promises vastly reduced load times and bigger worlds in modern games. According to benchmarks that PCGH recently shared, Intel’s GPU does quite a bit better than the competition in the realm of asset decompression, beating out both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT in SATA and PCIe runs. The testing was performed on a system with a Core i9-12900K processor.
From a PCGH report:
It doesn’t matter whether AMD Radeon, Intel Arc or Nvidia Geforce, the tool certifies a gigantic improvement through Direct Storage 1.1: The loading times through GPU-accelerated decompression are reduced enormously – from a good five seconds to half (!) – and the processor can do it devote yourself to other tasks thanks to minimal workload. Interestingly, graphics card newcomer Intel achieves the best results with the Arc A770.
Further tests will have to work out to what extent this is due to the processor substructure, which also comes from Intel, or whether the performance is independent of it. It is also confirmed that an SSD connected via SATA cannot benefit from Direct Storage since the NVME protocol is an elementary part of the feature.
Microsoft released DirectStorage 1.1 to developers in November 2022. The new version is headlined by the GPU decompression feature, which Microsoft implemented to help take work off of CPUs and better utilize the performance of GPUs, enabling quicker loading times and improved open-world streaming. DirectStorage is supported in Windows 10 and Windows 11, but Microsoft says the latter features exclusive optimizations.