According to the latest report, Microsoft’s DirectStorage API SDK has finally landed on Windows 11/10 recently, which means that game developers can now start using the technology to implement it in PC games. Following that, today we have the first demo of a game using DirectStorage – at the 2022 Game Developers Conference (GDC) event.
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Luminous Productions’ Forspoken, formerly Project Athia, has gotten the feature, and the numbers are impressive. Several loading scenarios were shown in the demo, and even with SATA-based SSDs, the improvement with Microsoft’s DirectStorage appeared to be noticeable; with faster NVMe SSDs, the gap looked even bigger.
During the demo, a graph was also provided showing the I/O (input-output) rate and corresponding game load times when using DirectStorage compared to the Windows Win32 storage API.
Moreover, the gains are especially impressive when looking at the NVMe numbers, as DirectStorage (4829 MB/s) showed a nearly 70% improvement compared to Win32 (2862 MB/s).
In terms of actual load times, the difference isn’t that big, but it could mean faster loading in some future games. In addition to Microsoft’s DirectStorage, Forspoken is also getting AMD’s new FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0, although support for the feature is currently in development. However, implementing it shouldn’t be difficult since the game already uses FSR 1.0 features.
