Significant performance boost shown with Directstorage 1.1

Just over two years ago, Microsoft announced that the Xbox Series X Directstorage storage interface would be coming to PC and Windows. In short, the technology allows data from storage devices to bypass the processor and send it directly to the GPU. By avoiding having to send several small pieces at once, special advantages can be achieved in games, where loading times can be shortened, for example, textures and scenes.

Directstorage tested in Forspoken – barely a second faster

One first edition, although not a major graphics-accelerated decompressor, became available this spring. Textures are among the most common types of compressed data in games. When decompression is still the responsibility of the processor, Directstorage does not have the same noticeable effect. This feature was promised for a later release, something Microsoft is now announcing as right around the corner.

in Blog post Directstorage 1.1 bait is introduced, which gets graphics-accelerated decompression. To show how it could be used in future games, they built and improved a test scene with a set of avocado models. When running Directstorage with graphics-accelerated compression enabled, the time it takes to load a scene is reduced by 66 percent – from 2.36 seconds to 0.8 seconds. In addition to simply running faster, the processor is almost completely relaxed and therefore can be used for other purposes.

Historically, it was common to allow a processor to process compressed files, as most formats are simply optimized for processors. On the other hand, graphics processors are more efficient for parallel computations, something Microsoft wants to take advantage of with Directstorage along with the bandwidth of NVM Express-based storage devices. Other storage devices work, but the lower the bandwidth, the less effective the technology.

It’s not clear exactly when Directstorage 1.1 will be available, other than it’s not very specific “soon”. Related to that, developers can also access documentation and more tools to implement the technology. At the moment, there are no games that officially support the technology, but it was introduced in the past Sample Title Forspoken Which is expected to arrive in February 2023.