News DirectStorage 1.1 Can Speed Game Loading by 40% Claims Microsoft

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Not sure GPU Decompression will do much for me, as I see not much a point in plopping e.g. a RTX 3060 alongside my current i5-4570 to begin with. But for many gamers, who upgrade the GPU more than anything else, there may be quite some boost there I suppose. See e.g. Steam hardware survey for September, according to which more than 40% have 4 physical cpus or less, while 22% have less than 4 GB VRAM.

And such a boost would be good news for everyone, as game development seems tied up a bit to deliver a product that most gamers can actually play. And when the average technical capacity moves up, more what game development can work with.

Whether there is a NVMe SSD in these rigs, and at which time some developers make use of particularly GPU Decompression, a bit different matter of course.
 
DavidLejdar said:
Not sure GPU Decompression will do much for me, as I see not much a point in plopping e.g. a RTX 3060 alongside my current i5-4570 to begin with. But for many gamers, who upgrade the GPU more than anything else, there may be quite some boost there I suppose. See e.g. Steam hardware survey for September, according to which more than 40% have 4 physical cpus or less, while 22% have less than 4 GB VRAM.

And such a boost would be good news for everyone, as game development seems tied up a bit to deliver a product that most gamers can actually play. And when the average technical capacity moves up, more what game development can work with.

Whether there is a NVMe SSD in these rigs, and at which time some developers make use of particularly GPU Decompression, a bit different matter of course.
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It seems that DirectStorage will only boost systems sporting a fast PCIe 5.0 SSD or the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD with the DirectStorage firmware (which are or will be super fast anyway) and not what most gamers have now 🙁
 
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It will always be much faster if compression/decompression is done through a dedicated chip like in PS5 . It may even be cheaper to acquire than through a non-specialized device, whether it is the CPU or the video card, which will spend some of its resources on such a non-specific activity.
 
So.. this will help IF
Game will utilize all the cpu/gpu power that system has.

I do admit that I don't play most recent games but so far rare few if any of them even try to use all 6 cores/12 threads I have, so I have plenty of CPU resources to use for decompression.
another issue is disk speeds.. my poor Nvme can only do about 3000Mbit/sec loads/writes, no more, no less.
However, since windows is poor at disk managing, (speaking of 10 here, 11 might be lot better for some reason) windows tries to re-read and re-write lot of already on disk data on disk and read already in memory data to memory AGAIN.
Cutting this useless use out will save up to 70% of disk usage, which can then again be used by the game.

So.. as shown by Microsoft, this could help games IF games use this.
Games could also fully utilize already existing hardware and be lot faster than they are now without this technology.

Also most games don't need to load 5.65GB of textures or such every second, if they do, it shows poor coding on developer side, showing yet again that while this is all nice... (and it doesn't tell what GPU was used for that decompression, said GPU might be out of normal person price range) it is a niche technology for now.

so.. theoretical gains, yes.. practical? that depends a lot on hardware and game developer.

in theory, my sata HDD also has 3000+Mbit read/write speeds, even in practical speed tests. It's a lie though due to background ramcaching I have but... tests don't see that, they see fast reads/writes.
 
George³ said:
I think you should show us how the files that make up future games are moved. 🤔
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It's not how the files move it's the sheer size of the files, in today's games there are files much bigger than 60MB, just imagine the size of 8K and 16K texture files even compressed...
There is also the issue that even if files will be split to smaller sizes, a "regular" SSD with no DirectStorage firmware cannot handle continuous usage because they are built for burst usage and DirectStorage will require continuous usage, look what happened to regular SSDs used for Chia mining
 
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As you can see, I appreciate you trying to think about it. However, the comparison between software tools that are completely different in terms of purpose and mode of operation is not correct. Chia does a huge amount of intensive writes on the used data store in the case of the SSD, and when it fills its capacity, it also overwrites(rewrites of cells). At least I have no data that Direct Storage does anything other than just read and copy from SSD and not constantly, but only when the game scene is about to be loaded into VRAM. Of course, there is also a record of the player's progress, but it is, as before, a very insignificant amount of data.
 
This will be great for games 10 years from when it's finished on PC, but much more impactful in Microsoft's own Xbox consoles.

It will definitively give windows an edge once storage technologies start plateauing on storage speed but still have lots of bandwidth available, but like others said here, by then GPUs/CPUs will have a bigger impact.
 
George³ said:
As you can see, I appreciate you trying to think about it. However, the comparison between software tools that are completely different in terms of purpose and mode of operation is not correct. Chia does a huge amount of intensive writes on the used data store in the case of the SSD, and when it fills its capacity, it also overwrites(rewrites of cells). At least I have no data that Direct Storage does anything other than just read and copy from SSD and not constantly, but only when the game scene is about to be loaded into VRAM. Of course, there is also a record of the player's progress, but it is, as before, a very insignificant amount of data.
Click to expand...
Phison with their early version of its new game-optimized I/O+ firmware expaines it better:
"All of this poses challenges for current consumer SSDs because they are designed for bursty rather than sustained workloads. Phison’s tailored tests imply a fuller drive that must sustain a tremendous amount of data read activity over multiple hours — 2.5 GBps is a minimum for low quality, but 5 GBps+ is desirable. For example, Forspoken's first public demo ran at medium detail and required a steady 4 GBps stream from the SSD.
Traditionally, “real world” consumer performance metrics have focused on 4KB accesses at low queue depths ranging from 1 to 4, but DirectStorage will use large random read accesses at very high queue depths. So here we’re dealing with large 32KB+ block sizes and a 512+ queue depth instead, which is representative of a potential DirectStorage workload. In fact, we should anticipate I/O up to 1MB in size, with 64KB being a typical target for consistency.
This type of workload also challenges a drive’s endurance due to 'Block Read Disturb,' a process that creates wear on frequently-read blocks, thus reducing endurance. Managing this condition is exceptionally important with DirectStorage SSDs — each block of game data can experience up to 20,000 page reads per hour over a 60 to 100GB span of the drive.
Block Read Disturb is a negligible condition with standard drives. However, the new firmware needs to maintain the flash due to the intense nature of DirectStorage workloads, all while still prioritizing host I/O requests. Hammering the flash with reads introduces bit errors over time which can temporarily impact performance, but drive access remains in high demand. Phison has developed smart scheduling for maintenance with adaptive wear algorithms that seamlessly work in the background so that performance remains consistent with minimal additive wear."
For Full article:
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/the-directstorage-advantage-phison-io-ssd-firmware-preview

HDDs, PCIe 3.0 SSDs and early PCIe 4.0 SSDs doesn't support this feature so that leaves only late and updated PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 SSDs as I mentioned in earlier post.
Take notice that this is only early version ang I personally predict that "standard" DirectStorage requirement, when most games will use DirectStorage, will be a PCIe 6.0 SSD.
 
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Apparently there are really few problems with the early versions of Direct Storage. I did not expect the need for such intense intertemporal activity in the SSD at all, after copying the game scene from the SSD to VRAM. It looks to me like incompetence and lack of creativity of Microsoft and Phison programmers.
 
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When MS released Win 11, Direct Storage was one of the features they said will be exclusive. Its been quite some time now, and as they openly admitted, there is not a single title that is using Direct Storage. If pickup rate for 1.0 is 0, I wonder what miracle will version 1.1 deliver here.
 
Wow, I thought it was perfectly usable from the start. I didnt notice, that GPU couldnt decompress textures just as in case of PS5 and Xbox Series. Does anybody know, why was that? Maybe shared memory on consoles helped it (since you dont have to copy from RAM to VRAM).
 
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