On Monday, Microsoft publicly released the DirectStorage 1.1 API to game developers, allowing them to use GPU-accelerated game asset decompression to assist reduce game loading times. This new DirectStorage version includes everything a developer needs to get started with GPU decompression. 

GDeflate: An Open GPU Compression Standard
GDeflate is a high-performance, scalable, GPU-optimized data compression scheme that can help applications make use of the sheer amount of data throughput available on modern NVMe devices. It makes streaming decompression from such devices practical by eliminating CPU bottlenecks from the overall I/O pipeline. GDeflate also provides bandwidth amplification effects, further improving the effective throughput of the I/O subsystem.

GDeflate Open Source will be released on GitHub with a permissive license for IHVs and ISVs. We want to encourage the quick embrace of GDeflate as a data-parallel compression standard, facilitating its adoption across the PC ecosystem and on other platforms.

To show the benefits of GDeflate, we measured system performance without compression, with standard CPU-side decompression, and with GPU-accelerated GDeflate decompression on a representative game-focused dataset, containing texture and geometry data. As you can see from Figures 1 and 2, the data throughput of uncompressed streaming is limited by the system bus bandwidth at about ~3 GB/s, which happens to be the limit of a Gen3 PCIe interconnect.

When applying traditional compression with decompression happening on the CPU, it’s the CPU that becomes the overall bottleneck, resulting in lower throughput than would otherwise be possible with uncompressed streaming. Not only does it underutilize available I/O resources of the system, but it also takes away CPU cycles from other tasks needing CPU resources.

With GPU-accelerated GDeflate decompression, the system can deliver effective bandwidth well in excess of what’s possible without applying compression. It is effectively multiplying data throughput by its compression ratio. The CPU remains fully available for performing other important tasks, maximizing system-level performance.

GDeflate is available as a standard GPU decompression option in DirectStorage 1.1—a modern I/O streaming API from Microsoft. We’re looking forward to next-generation game engines benefiting from GDeflate

DirectStorage 1.1 Now Available