Microsoft has announced that starting today, Windows games can begin to support the DirectStorage API. This API, which first appeared on the Xbox Series X, changes the way games read data from NVMe SSD drives, bypassing the processing of the CPU, so it can use the full speed of the SSD for faster fast read speeds and faster load times.
Microsoft announced it back in September 2020 for Windows, but it won’t be widely available to Xbox developers until 2021, and PC gaming is officially supported today. Simply put, the previous API only allowed games to load data from the drive with one I/O request at a time, and each request had to complete completely before another request was processed, and due to the speed of mechanical hard drives and SATA SSDs It’s not fast, and it doesn’t have a big impact on load times.
But now, since NVMe hard drives using PCIe channels are basically popular, most PCs can achieve reading speeds of several gigabytes. Therefore, PCs should no longer process only one request at a time, because in this case, the hard drives cannot use the full bandwidth at all. strength, which means games load much slower than their test scores.
DirectStorage addresses these issues by allowing multiple I/O requests at once to reuse new decompression techniques and more efficiently pass data from disk to GPU compute shaders. So games can load faster when using DirectStorage, and also use larger packets, which can load faster, reduce player wait times, and as developers get used to it, in-game textures, etc. will also be more detailed.
Windows 11 users benefit the most thanks to the new storage stack. However, Windows 10 users will also see more improvements in the future (some features are now supported). According to the previous information, all DX12 GPUs can use this feature, but for the best experience, Microsoft still recommends the latest DX12 Ultimate compatible products, such as NVIDIA RTX 30 series, AMD RX 6000 series GPUs.
While Microsoft hasn’t mentioned any games that will use the technology, you can expect games that have previously supported the DirectStorage API on Xbox to quickly adapt to the Windows platform, so stay tuned.