DirectStorage slowly continues to gain traction on PCs since being revealed in 2020 and now Alan Wake 2 has been spotted using it to push a Gen5 SSD to its limits. The sequel game from Remedy Entertainment has already received praise for its realistic-looking visuals which has placed the game in the current list for benchmarking but now its use of the newer DirectX API feature adds another metric to track. Alan Wake 2 was spotted hitting speeds up to 2.74 GB/s during testing on a Crucial T700 Gen5 SSD bringing the NVMe SSD within 9°C of its thermal throttling temperature.
Compusemble noted the Crucial T700 Gen5 SSD peaking at 78° during testing, which begins throttling at 87°. While Alan Wake 2 is not the first game to utilize DirectStorage for faster loading times it is one of the latest in the growing list of games to be reported doing so. Consoles have enjoyed larger support for the increased transfer speeds with NVMe drives since the current-gen launch. Sony’s PlayStation 5 has had bragging rights since it was first announced and so has the Xbox X|S, each with reported speeds in the GB/s. The downside, of course, is the increased temperatures during heavy use hence the more aggressive cooling solutions that have been seen with Gen5 NVMe drives.
Per Tom’s Hardware:
“Alan Wake 2’s high-fidelity assets can clearly put a lot of stress on a storage drive, resulting in the Gen 5 NVMe drive used in testing consistently being on the higher end of its optimal temperatures, though fortunately not within range of proper thermal throttling. That’s an unavoidable side effect of the 2.74 GB/s of read throughput peak during a scene transition. The game also consistently stresses the SSD with around 1.6 GB/s of throughput.”