Microsoft DirectStorage can save 20-40% CPU load
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lukas_1987_dion
Nice ad for W11 :P
schmidtbag
I'm looking forward to further developments with this type of technology. In particular, an open-source alternative. There are ways where on-card storage could be taken advantage of even for games that never had DS compatibility. Even if it just acts as a swap/paging file for video memory, it would yield a huge performance impact.
AlmondMan
"The CPU cycles might then be used by game creators to accomplish something else, such as processing considerably more complicated AI behaviors."
They've said that since ... forever? 😀 first it was with hyperthreading, then it was with multicores and more multicores and unified shaders and so on and so forth, yet today we hardly see anything beyond Doom's enemy AI in most games.
It might be that they CAN do all kinds of things, but when you just snipe them all from afar or something does it really matter?
TheDeeGee
My CPU usage is always low due to 60 FPS cap.
Mannerheim
We have enough CPU for 1000 years, we need better code to use it. I think this directstorage will be just another fail.
thesebastian
With a 138~ FPS cap I do suffer CPU bottlenecks quite a lot. But mostly in DX11 games.
In MMOs like New World I even suffer below 60 FPS when surrounded by lot of players.
99% of the time it's always 1 thread from the game that can use only 1 core and hits the core capacity generating a bottleneck.
Clouseau
Obviously not understanding something here. If games are getting more graphically intensive, would you not want to put more load on the cpu to free up the GPU since that is the bottleneck at higher resolutions? Or is this just a bunch of hoopla about essentially nothing of significance gaming wise just to make WIN 11 sound more enticing?
Eastcoasthandle
Do I get to try this or is this just an ad?
Ven0m
And don't forget about all DRM-like code that adds overhead, kills the branch prediction, and basically makes us need faster and faster CPUs.
If my 8700K is struggling to keep 60fps+ in games that don't look photo-realistic, then something's wrong
LimitbreakOr
This doesn't say anything about actually solving the load time problem with PC. I just got a PS5 recently and played Ratchet and Clank which is a ps5 exclusive, i am extremely impressed. This is truly next generation gaming in ways most don't realize. Being able to load game material so fast is quite impressive, the game feels like you're playing you're playing a pixar animation. This is essentially making the system shared ram act more like a short term cache since the PS5 can actually load 9GB/s (5.5GB/s read with hardware decompression) which can fill up all necessary material in about a second. This doesn't just completely make loading screens obsolete but also completely revolutionizes game design.
Until this is resolved on the PC, console gaming will be superior... Graphics horsepower is just one factor among many others.
Console master race until then?
tsunami231
so this mean my SSD drive on windows 10 will actual be able to use it speed it capable of IF the game support it? i not switching to win11 let alone getting nvme there to expensive per gb/tb and run way to hot imo.
cause as it stands most games load just as fast as they do on SSD as they do on good HDD, engine that do alot streaming assets so the most gains there even if there not really the noticable.
JamesSneed
The fastest NVMe drives are close enough to those speeds to consider it a small difference. The early PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD's are already showing 14GB/s reads which will be out later this year.
I run dual NVMe drives in my PC and honestly load times are not really something I notice.
LimitbreakOr
I understand that the hardware is technically better on a pc, my 980 pro is actually faster than the ps5 internal storage. What makes this console superior is how it handles i/o so well, it can actually take advantage of that speed while on the pc it is currently impossible to physically get the data from the SSD to the GPU ram at those speeds. I'm really hoping that this shortcoming can be corrected sometimes soon.
vestibule
I've always been a firm believer that: Windows Knows Best.
Yes indeedy
So there we are then no need to tinker under the hood but if you would like to have a little dabble don't forget to type in search mscongif.
PrMinisterGR
I'm on the same boat. I was playing GT7 recently and I realized that tracks load instantly between license tests. When I say instantly, I mean there are no loading screens, you just press "Next" there is a fade to black and then you're on the next test, on the next track.
Even with Direct Storage I don't think that we will reach the efficiencies the consoles have, but it will be a great addition, and I think that the Vulkan bois should cook something similar asap.
LimitbreakOr
While that is very impressive b in its self, you should try ratchet and clank if you get a chance, they actually take advantage of the quick loading as a game mechanic. This is only possible if the game is exclusively made for the ps5.
i hope there is/will be more games like it.
CPC_RedDawn
CPU will make next to no difference at higher resolutions as a CPU isn't designed to push pixels to the screen its designed to process data and send it to where it needs to be. So removing the bottleneck of streaming in huge amounts of data which needs to be decompressed, processed, and sent to where it needs to go (mainly the GPU). Direct Storage removes this bottleneck and allows the data to be read directly by the GPU.
Moving memory (of any kind) also removes latency. This is why memory controllers were removed from the northbridge on motherboards to the CPU.
ThermaL1102
developers had this tech. a full year , shouldn't there be games with this storage tech. already ?
there where 3 stages , this is just stage one , it was already build in to windows 11 as of last year ...
developers just need to implement it in games , it's not a tech. that just works for every game , i think
Horus-Anhur
The Direct Storage SDK for PC, was only released this 14th of March.
Serotonin
Been PC gaming too long to buy into this BS. Nothing ever happens with these claims. Just like DX12 was gonna save the universe and be the best api ever making hardware closer to metal than any other time in PC gaming. It's a stuttering mess. With minimal gains. "Dev's have to support it" ok, whatever excuse you want to make, as a gamer, the gains simply don't exist. So I don't care who's fault it is. When I'm told something will bring X amount of performance increase and it never does, you learn fast not to buy into the claims.
Also, what good does CPU load do at 4k when the gpu is doing most of the work? So is this one of those claims with fine print *40% save tested in one game @ 720p*
The only thing I have seen in my old age that has met and even exceeded it's hype of improved performance is dlss. That is how you hype something and deliver and add value and longevity to someones hardware even as it ages.
