Forspoken Demo of Microsoft DirectStorage
Luminous Productions showcases the technologies used in Forspoken as part of GDC 2022. It showcases a variety of software implementations, including Microsoft DirecStorage API. There is also Fidelity library improvements and FSR, which only shows 1.0 but promises 2.0 once available.
Luminous Productions compares three storage options using DirectStorage. The loading times are identical without the API, but the NVMe requires 1.9 seconds to load the scene. A SATA SSD takes 3.7 seconds, while an HDD takes 21.5 seconds.
What is Microsoft DirectStorage exactly?
Microsft DirectStorage, a public SDK, was released on March 14th. It aims to reduce loading times for NVMe SSDs. This is achieved by loading information from the RAM into a system onto GPU VRAM. This allows the GPU’s decompression to take place. It works better for streaming and loading times. This saves CPUsignificant effort and frees up the IO. The GPU supports constant maxed IO rates to load times, and data remains the smallest size until reaching the destination.
DirectStorage is an important factor in the current generation of consoles that benefit from a more coherent and integrated system. The system works more efficiently, reducing latency among the components. Even though it is only an NVMe SSD, this may not be the best solution for all your games.
