The DirectStorage team at Microsoft has announced that DirectStorage 1.1 is now available, offering faster load times in supported games. DirectStorage is an alternative method for asset compression and decompression in games. Traditionally this task has primarily been handled by the CPU and then copied over to GPU memory. DirectStorage aims to offload this task, via the faster speeds of NVMe drives, to the GPU instead. By enabling GPU compression/decompression load times can be greatly reduced while also freeing up CPU resources. However, developers must implement DirectStorage on their own but Microsoft has provided the resources on GitHub and optimized drivers as well for AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA.
“GPU decompression is supported on all DirectX 12 + Shader Model 6.0 GPUs. However, one of the benefits of DirectStorage 1.1 is that GPU hardware vendors can provide additional optimizations for their hardware, called metacommands. For more information about support for these metacommands from our partners, see the links below. As always, we recommend updating to the latest drivers for your gaming hardware for the best performance.
AMD: https://gpuopen.com/amd-support-for-microsoft-directstorage-1-1
Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/news/directstorage-on-intel-gpus.html
Previously announced in October, DirectStorage 1.1 has yet to be implemented in any games but NVIDIA has already incorporated it with its RTX IO: GPU-Accelerated Storage Technology as of the Game Ready Driver (version 526.47). Square Enix and Luminous Productions’ upcoming fantasy RPG, Forspoken teased a load time of 1.7 seconds but that game release has been pushed back to 2023. DirectStorage is supported by any DX12-enabled GPU with Windows 10 or 11 and is already used by Xbox Series X consoles.
Everything is faster
At a time when game textures, and other assets, are reaching epic sizes due to increased resolutions for 4K gaming, new methods of loading them hold promise for greatly improved gaming experiences. From innovations with consoles, as seen with the PS5 and Xbox Series X, to PC with AMD’s Smart Access Memory and NVIDIA’s Resizable BAR, to faster drives (NVME Gen3/Gen4), interfaces (PCIe 4.0/5.0), and memory (DDR4/DDR5 and GDDR6X), many technologies are coming together to make these promises a reality. Now it will just take time for developers to adopt to DirectStorage on PC for upcoming games.
Discussion (6 replies)
Join Discussion →MS has been hyping this since before Win 11 (so, well over a year) and the are still no games that use it.
LMK when somebody fixes the load times in Civ 6.
So one game will use it, Forspoken, and not till 2023. Call me when it matters.
Yea still waiting on this feature to catch on. Feels like once it does anyone already on the cutting edge of bus speeds for storage will be like.. meh.. not that big a deal.
[embedded media] (haven't watched yet)
Related article: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-forspoken-pc-tech-review (Only skimmed the DirectStorage stuff)
"One of the few bright spots of Forspoken on its PC are related to its loading times, which are excellent - in some cases, faster than the already near-instantaneous PS5 version. This is because this is the first shipping title with DirectStorage 1.1, Microsoft’s toolbox for cutting down loading times on PCs equipped with (ideally) NVMe SSDs running Windows 10 or 11."
"When loading the exact same save from the same area, we can see a 3.5GB/s (PCIe 3.0) SSD loads the game faster than on PS5 (4.1s vs 4.4s); with DirectStorage disabled with a command line option, the same load takes around 25 percent longer (5.4s), making it slower than PS5. That’s with a fast 12900K processor though; the same drive used with an older, slower Ryzen 5 3600 still benefits from DirectStorage (6.7s enabled vs 11.7s disabled) but loads do take longer. So DirectStorage helps, but CPU speed is also a factor. Similarly, SATA drives also benefit from DirectStorage..."
"Finally, Windows 11 offers better loading performance than Windows 10, with game loads finishing two seconds faster on Windows 11 with DirectStorage on (6.8s vs 8.8s), and essentially the same speed with DirectStorage off (~11.8s)."
"Note that the DirectStorage 1.1 standard does include GPU decompression, but this doesn’t appear to be used in Forspoken at present, with no GPU compute usage spike when the game is doing a dedicated load. So despite not using what is arguably the most interesting part of the DirectStorage 1.1 API, the game’s loading speeds are significantly faster than they would be otherwise."
Its good this exists, buuut, hopefully it won't turn into yet another crutch for programmers to count on fixing their even more unoptimized bloated code. If that happens, I absolutely guarantee we will be right back where we started, after a small period of improvement.
And I bet that's why it's a 150GB storage pig.