Luminous Productions, a game developer, has revealed that its next game, Forspoken, will be one of the first products to embrace Microsoft's DirectStorage technology.
Teppei Ono, Luminous' Technical Director, used a video that was partially put online today to demonstrate the speed advantages that may be expected from using the new DirectStorage subsystem. Complex scenes including over 20,000 files (weighing in roughly 4.5 GB) required only 1.7 seconds to transition from the loading screen to Forspoken's amazing open world.
Two separate scenarios were loaded across multiple storage subsystems in the video presentation: an M.2 SSD, SATA SSD, and HDD. Both the new DirectStorage API and the traditional (and eventually outdated) Win32 storage subsystem were used to test the setups.
Not all storage is created equal. Even the slowest of SSD options would outperform the HDD used to load the game, whether DirectStorage was activated or not. An M.2 SSD took 1.9 seconds to load the scene in scene one with DirectStorage enabled. This was followed by the SATA SSD at 3.7 seconds - more than quadruple the interval - while the HDD took 21.5 seconds to find its own spinning platters.
For this initial scene, Luminous gave further statistics on throughput for the various storage systems, and the findings are eye-opening. The M.2 SSD achieved an outstanding 4,839 MB/s performance while using the DirectStorage API. Under the Win32 API, the identical disk provided nearly half that, at 2,826 MB/s.
It appears that a bottleneck is still in place: one would anticipate load times to be impacted in the same proportion as throughput, but this isn't the case. A 71 percent boost in SSD performance in DirectStorage over Win32 only results in a 0.2 second (about 10%) reduction in load times, dropping it from 2.1 seconds to 1.9 seconds.
One explanation for this might be that Forspoken is still hitting a CPU wall, despite DirectStorage's advances. Perhaps the still-missing GPU acceleration component, which Microsoft is still working on including into DirectStorage, might help matters even more. The developers hope that they will eventually be able to reduce load times to less than one second, albeit this should be considered the exception rather than the rule.
Scene two has the quickest load times. The performance ratio between the three storage systems remains almost the same: the M.2 SSD took 1.7 seconds, while the SATA drive took 3.2 seconds. The HDD finished in last position, as expected, with a time of 19.9 seconds. Forspoken was supposed to be released on May 25th, however, a recent delay pushed that date back by five months to October 11th. If only the Forspoken release could take advantage of DirectStorage as well.
Forspoken Game Dev Says DirectStorage + 20,000 files at 4.5 GB loads in 1.7 seconds
