When Microsoft announced Windows 11 last year, it pointed out that Windows 11 will be able to enjoy the accelerated loading technology DirectStorage technology of the Xbox Series X|S to load games rapidly, making gamers look forward to it. A few days ago, Microsoft officially launched the DirectStorage API to game developers, making PC games into an accelerated era.
GPU directly decompresses material and uploads image memory
The principle of DirectStorage is to directly transfer game data such as materials to the GPU for decompression from the SSD and put them into the image memory, which is different from the previous process of relying on the CPU to decompress the materials first and then upload them to the image memory, thereby speeding up game loading. time.
Although Microsoft initially promoted DirectStorage as one of the selling points of Windows 11, following the official launch, not only Windows 11 support, but also Windows 10 can enjoy the acceleration of DirectStorage. Of course, Microsoft still emphasizes that Windows 11 has recent storage optimizations and is their recommended path to play.
PCIe 4 NVMe SSD for maximum acceleration
Although Microsoft says that any storage device can benefit from DirectStorage, to enjoy the highest speed, of course, install the game on the NVMe SSD to obtain the highest speed IO performance. The popular PCIe 4.0 interface provides a continuous read speed of up to 7GB/s.
DirectStorage demo at GDC
Of course, this announcement is only the opening of the API, and game developers are also required to add relevant technologies to the game. Microsoft has already provided support for DirectStorage in PIX on Windows, the DirectX debug evaluation tool, so that developers can understand the acceleration performance of games embedded with new technologies.
In addition, at the Game Developers Conference GDC held on March 22, Microsoft will introduce the development skills of DirectStorage, and AMD will also demonstrate the performance of DirectStorage with the game “Forspoken” by Luminous Productions. Introducing more games that use DirectStorage.
