More than two years after its announcement, Microsoft has finally brought the DirectStorage API to the PC platform (previously used for the Xbox X/S consoles), but it’s an incomplete one.
Simply put, DirectStorage is a storage subsystem acceleration technology that allows GPU compute shaders to directly access NVMe SSDs and directly handle the decompression of game resources without bypassing the CPU, thus greatly improving game loading speed and reducing latency, but also saving CPU resources.
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The RTX IO technology of the NVIDIA RTX 30 series graphics card is actually born out of the DirectStorage API (similar to NVIDIA RT ray tracing and Microsoft DXR API), which is equivalent to an implementation of this technology on the N card.
The official claim is that the input/output performance is traditional up to 100 times of hard disk storage and 20 times less CPU usage. The DirectStorage API system supports Windows 10/11, and of course, Microsoft recommends Windows 11 because of its built-in storage optimization mechanism.
In terms of hardware, the previous requirement of SSD was to support NVMe and PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0, but NVMe is not required now, not only M.2/PCIe SSD can be used, but even SATA SSD. The graphics card needs to support DX12, and the latest DX12 Ultimate is recommended, including NVIDIA RTX 30 series, AMD RX 6000 series.
However, at present, DirectStorage does not support GPU acceleration on PC, and the effect will be greatly reduced. Microsoft only promises that GPU acceleration is on the roadmap, and the next step will be realized.
