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PC game load times are about to get a whole lot faster thanks to Microsoft’s DirectStorage techDirectStorage and RTX IO explained
DirectStorage and RTX IO explained
The tech behind the super fast load times on the Xbox Series X is coming to PCs in the form of DirectStorage, Microsoft have announced. The DirectX API aims to dramatically reduce loading times and enable developers to create bigger, more detailed worlds than ever before thanks to its “best in class IO tech” (that’s input / output, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term) - if you’ve got the right kind of SSD, that is.
But what is DirectStoragereally, and how does it differ from Nvidia’s recently announced RTX IO, which promises a very similar thing for the newRTX 3070,RTX 3080andRTX 3090cards? Read on below for everything you need to know.
“Even with super-fast PC hardware and an NVMe drive, games using the existing APIs will be unable to fully saturate the IO pipeline leaving precious bandwidth on the table,” Microsoft said in theirblog post.
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Enter DirectStorage, a new API that aims to get rid of those age-old bottlenecks in order to improve load times and allow game worlds to be bigger and more detailed than ever before. In a nutshell, DirectStorage streamlines your PC’s entire IO system so it can load in data to your RAM and graphics card memory banks much more efficiently. It also uses “the best current and upcoming decompression technologies” to get said data into your GPU quickly so it can be rendered, and effectively allows games to fully maximise the performance throughput of your NVMe SSD.
“In this way, developers are given an extremely efficient way to submit/handle many orders of magnitude more IO requests than ever before ultimately minimizing the time you wait to get in game, and bringing you larger, more detailed virtual worlds that load in as fast as your game character can move through it,” according to Microsoft.
DirectStorage vs Nvidia RTX IO
“When used with Microsoft’s new DirectStorage for Windows API, RTX IO offloads dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to your GeForce RTX GPU, improving frame rates, enabling near-instantaneous game loading, and opening the door to a new era of large, incredibly detailed open world games,” according to Nvidia.
Indeed, Nvidia call DirectStorage a “next generation storage architecture designed specifically for gaming PCs equipped with state of the art NVMe SSDs,” so I wouldn’t be surprised if existing PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives end up being left out in the cold.
What Iamkeen to find out, though, is whether Nvidia’s RTX IO tech will end up being even faster than DirectStorage when they’re used together. After all, the upcoming second generation ofBig NaviGPUs sit at the heart of both the Xbox Series X and PS5, and I’d imagine thatAMD’s imminent RX 6000 graphics cardswill be built around Microsoft’s DirectStorage tech as well. AMD have always favoured open source technologies rather than going down their own proprietary route like Nvidia, so I’d be very interested to see whether Nvidia’s RTX IO adds anything on top of DirectStorage, or whether it’s just nonsense marketing fluff to make Nvidia’s RTX 3000 cards look better.
