DirectStorage 1.1 Coming Soon
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Horus-Anhur
And still, not one single game that uses Direct Storage on PC. Not even Microsoft's first party games.
vestibule
But wait, wont it burn out my SSD. 😕
KissSh0t
Maybe by the time Windows 12 releases.
Horus-Anhur
Seriously, the biggest bottleneck in the PC space today is not hardware, it's Microsoft.
To think that we had hardware with support for GPU decompression since 2018 in Turing. And we have SSDs as mainstream for 15 years.
Even nvme's are used in PCs for almost a decade now.
But Microsoft is constantly lagging. NVidia, AMD and Intel might be able to release the most advanced tech, but it won't be used for years and years, because MS is constantly slacking off.
They can't even release a Windows update without breaking something because of some bug.
PrMinisterGR
Finally. This is the only way for PC gaming to survive the next-gen-only AAA generation that is on the way. I wonder how Proton will handle this.
Cave Waverider
Yeah, it looks like it could become a big problem for Proton in the future. 🙁
Stairmand
It creates no additional load on the storage drive.
vestibule
@Stairmand or other.
So, what are we dealing with here? Is DS1.1 some kind of SSD specific page file that moves that Big info to the GPU for decompression?
Also do you think that games like cyber punk and recent titles will get patches for this new DS1.1?.
NewTRUMP Order
And truth be told direct storage isn't all that to begin with. DirectStorage shows minor load-speed improvements in real-world PC demo | Ars Technica https://media0.giphy.com/media/3o6ZthLQaA5dPSRNBK/200w.gif?cid=ecf05e47rm9dc95v8wif7hy5zy9iv7a7u6aifkwitxbx7vov&rid=200w.gif&ct=g
brogadget
MS´s embarrassing attempts to make use of high performance hardware is horrible and they are just incapable to. Best examples are Xbox "Virtual Disk" garbage and lack support of multi GPU setups. Why not using another CPU core or even cores to decompress data instead of loading the GPU in addition? MS mainly focuses on how to get your personal data and not how to develop software which uses hardware more efficiently..
Silva
Examples from the past and present don't really justify the tech. But if you really push the next gen games, that's where the gains will start to add up.
Currently the difference to a fast SSD is negligible, but with big open worlds without loading screens with 4k or even 8k textures, you'll need every bit of performance you can get.
PS: Also, it would be awesome if GPUs stopped increasing in VRAM and getting more expensive if this tech could help fast swap assets fast enough to just use 8Gb VRAM where you'd need 16Gb or more. Cheaper GPUs because you don't need as much VRAM, dream!
reix2x
Kuddos to Microsoft for that aguacate benchmark, it looks delicious with bread and a pinch of salt
tunejunky
you said what i was going to say except you said it better.
ivanosky
This is the traditional way that has been used by game developers. The problem is that decompressing on the CPU is slower and keeps the CPU busy decompressing assets while it could be doing other things, like Physics, NPCs' AI, etc. This is why Spiderman on PC has high CPU loads when traversing the city and needs a significantly more powerful CPU than the PS5's CPU to maintain 60 FPS. Because Spiderman heavily uses the PS5's bespoke decompression chip instead of the CPU.
Decompressing on the GPU should be orders of magnitude faster, due to its highly parallel architecture, and since it's so fast it should only keep the GPU busy a very short amount of time (in the order of milliseconds), thus not affecting graphics performance. Also, it should decrease the high usage of System RAM by games, since data can move directly to the GPU VRAM instead of being loaded on System RAM an after decompression being copied to VRAM.
Horus-Anhur
Because a GPU is much faster than a CPU at this task.
https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/news/rtx-io-gpu-accelerated-storage-technology/geforce-rtx-30-series-rtx-io-announcing-rtx-io.jpg
asturur
to make direcstorage look better they added a bug in windows 11 file copy, so that normal copy looks slower.
Except the bug is bugged, and so it shows only on some configuration.
Now they have to fix it, and the plan failed
schmidtbag
While I think it's good to have DS as a means to fine-tune games, I think it's best if there's a more general approach that can work with any game, where it basically just acts as an on-AIB cache for recent game assets. Same kind of idea as Steam's pre-compiled shader cache - it improves game performance without depending on either the game or driver developers.
Anything that can yield a performance boost that works automatically is a very worthwhile feature, even if it isn't optimized.
Primey0
Don't be so ridiculous
Ghosty
Once I've figured out Vertex Shaders, I'll have a look in to it.
mbk1969
Aside the speed and parallelism of GPU operations there is the benefit of loading compressed assets to videocard (for further decompression) - smaller size of data to load. If you decompress assets on CPU side then data to load to GPU will increase in size.
