AMD Smart Access Storage (DirectStorage) to get introduced in Corsair Voyager laptop
AMD is working on Smart Access Storage, which will be available in June in Corsair's first gaming laptop. That would be Corsair's first gaming notebook, to ship in June.
Smart Access Storage may be a Microsoft DirectStorage API implementation, a hardware-accelerated decompression method. After more than a year of waiting, the technology became accessible on PCs in March. Then came the first game demo. This method reduces game loading times. It has been utilized effectively on Xbox Series consoles since 2020. Given the timing, it's probable that Red will provide further details at the Computex trade exhibition at the end of May. Microsoft delivered speedy Xbox loading to Windows 10 and Windows 11 in March. This SDK transfers game elements straight from storage to the GPU, reducing loading times. DirectStorage has only been seen in a Forspoken demo, thus far.
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well, it supposes to decrease the number of CPU cycles so it is beneficial to some degree.
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The CPU has to decompress, wait, decompress, wait, decompress...compared to the GPU's low latency memory. The GPU can decompress large amounts of data in seconds.
You're right..and at this point, the community should get some beta drivers at the very least for benchmarks, testing, etc. The desktop would be ideal for starting these types of tests as we cannot replace the GPU's is most laptops.
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can't have drivers because theres no ratified implementation of the tech yet.
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I'm confused why this needs its own title for AMD -- correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't DirectStorage a Windows stack thing? Or is it that Nvidia/AMD have to also implement it in their driver then?
If it's something different, will AMD's version of DirectStorage have GPU decompress at launch I wonder. Still seems a odd to me microsoft's won't initially, but perhaps this is just tough to implement on PC, I'm not sure.
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Kinda weird this would be introduced in a laptop, seeing as they don't have a lot of physical space for additional components and they're more bottlenecked by thermals than memory or PCIe bandwidth.