News DirectStorage Testing Shows PCIe 3 Drives Are Basically as Fast as PCIe 5

PlaneInTheSky

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Note that a lot of benefits found in DirectStorage have little to do with the speed of the SSD.

A lot of changes in Directstorage 1.0 are about software overhead when the GPU has to access assets. You can notice these benefits even when using SATA SSD.

And the major change in DirecStorage 1.1 is GDeflate , that uses the GPU instead of the CPU to decompress assets like textures and shaders. While you do need a regular NVMe SSD to be able to get all those assets to the GPU in a timely manner, a PCIe 3.0 SSD works just fine. The real cut in loading times is due to the GPU doing the decompression instead of the GPU.

The reason why a game won't load instantly yet, even with DirectStorage 1.1, has nothing to do with hardware anymore. They're largely network calls, to DRM servers, Denuvo bloat, etc.
 
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PlaneInTheSky

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No baseline results? What's the load time WITHOUT directstorage enabled?

DirectStorage cuts loading times in Forspoken by about 36% on average.

Significant, but not earth-shattering either. Forspoken also uses Denuvo, which we know impacts loading times in games, and DirectStorage has no effect on that.

Caure.jpg
 

CRamseyer

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The built in benchmark doesn't take into account longterm gameplay where the same files are read thousands of time per hour. Not only that, the game doesn't use GDeflate.
 
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RichardtST

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So... If the speed of the drive matters very little, but DS being on or off matters roughly 35-50%, that would imply that the interface is mostly avoiding a bunch of software bloat. And there is only so much bloat that Windows will allow you to remove. Perhaps attach the storage directly to the GPU with a small coprocessor running a stripped little file-access-oriented OS? Remove the problem (Windows) completely. That would be a cool little project!
 

tamalero

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DirectStorage cuts loading times in Forspoken by about 36% on average.

Significant, but not earth-shattering either. Forspoken also uses Denuvo, which we know impacts loading times in games, and DirectStorage has no effect on that.

Caure.jpg
I'm sorry but getting a 36% loading boost on average with no additional expenses or changes to hardware is def worth every bit of it. "Not Earth shattering" XD
If they can make the scenes load almost instantly, its worth it for seamless gameplay.
 

Fates_Demise

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why?
if the performance is a mere3seconds load...save $ and get cheaper, larger capacity drive.

might even not need a high end MB since pcie gen 5 has little use now (not even gpu can use all of gen4)

It's 3 seconds for that game, games 5 years from not might be 30 seconds+. Future proof your build if the price is justified.
 
It's 3 seconds for that game, games 5 years from not might be 30 seconds+. Future proof your build if the price is justified.
...or get larger drive now, and if game is benefited in future get a gen 5 when cost is lowered and has value...

all depends on how games end up benefiting from it and tech usually takes many yrs to get adopted let alone improvements.
 

kiniku

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This is really no surprise as Windows itself has been the bottleneck for NvMe SSDs. DirectStorage is looking good. But I look forward to the day when everything on Windows takes advantage of the speed of NVMe SSD storage natively. Not with some fancy titled workarounds.
 
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truerock

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Note that a lot of benefits found in DirectStorage have little to do with the speed of the SSD.

A lot of changes in Directstorage 1.0 are about software overhead when the GPU has to access assets. You can notice these benefits even when using SATA SSD.

And the major change in DirecStorage 1.1 is GDeflate , that uses the GPU instead of the CPU to decompress assets like textures and shaders. While you do need a regular NVMe SSD to be able to get all those assets to the GPU in a timely manner, a PCIe 3.0 SSD works just fine. The real cut in loading times is due to the GPU doing the decompression instead of the GPU.

The reason why a game won't load instantly yet, even with DirectStorage 1.1, has nothing to do with hardware anymore. They're largely network calls, to DRM servers, Denuvo bloat, etc.
 

CRamseyer

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The game doesn't use DirectStorage to it's fullest. It's not streaming the data like you will see on future titles and it doesn't use the GPU for decompression. This us like a bare minimum implementation of DirectStorage.
 
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wr3zzz

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The difference will matter in 2035 loading my 500GB modded TES6... What am I saying, it probably still won't matter since Bethesda will be doing DirectStorage like they did it in 2025.
 
I'm sorry but getting a 36% loading boost on average with no additional expenses or changes to hardware is def worth every bit of it. "Not Earth shattering" XD
If they can make the scenes load almost instantly, its worth it for seamless gameplay.
It looks like in the best-case scenarios, the load times can get cut roughly in half for that game, which might be more significant if the game had longer load times, but here we are talking about reducing the already short load times by less than a second. So I would agree that at least for this game, the differences are not exactly "Earth shattering".

It's 3 seconds for that game, games 5 years from not might be 30 seconds+. Future proof your build if the price is justified.
It's a 3 second difference going from around 14 seconds to 11 seconds when moving from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0/5.0, amounting to a little over a 20% reduction. And that's with 7 different load times combined to arrive at that number. The actual individual load times are in the 1 to 3 seconds range, where a 20% difference would typically amount to less than half a second. Do you expect future games to be loading 60+ times as much data to arrive at a 30 second difference? If so, you might want to focus more on capacity than transfer speed. : P

And of course, that data needs to be put somewhere. If DirectStorage manages to allow these drives to near their maximum transfer rates when loading game assets, then one would expect the graphics memory to be full within seconds, limiting how long initial load times could potentially be. It's possible there could also be a difference to in-game performance when streaming in high-resolution textures during gameplay, but this game doesn't seem to really demonstrate that.

...or get larger drive now, and if game is benefited in future get a gen 5 when cost is lowered and has value...

all depends on how games end up benefiting from it and tech usually takes many yrs to get adopted let alone improvements.
Yeah, capacity might even be more important if future games continue growing in size. If AAA games 5 years from now are commonly a couple-hundred gigabytes in size, then having more capacity might be more beneficial than a minor reduction to load times. Though if one is in the market for a new drive anyway, they might as well get a 4.0 drive at this point, since there generally isn't that much of a price difference anymore. I suspect 5.0 drives will carry a big premium though, that probably won't be worth the cost over 4.0 models.

The difference will matter in 2035 loading my 500GB modded TES6... What am I saying, it probably still won't matter since Bethesda will be doing DirectStorage like they did it in 2025.
In 2035 Bethesda will finally announce their next long awaited installment in the series, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 25th anniversary Edition.
 
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KraakBal

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It's because IOPS haven't changed much. I haven't given a sh!t about sequential speeds for years and everyone still markets mainly that
 
D

Deleted member 431422

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Sigh, another silly made up reason to make people buy the latest hardware. The difference is negligible, I'd say not existent. I haven't seen much improvement in 4K random 1T with the latest drives. It's only sequential transfers that improved. That and we're loosing durability with QLC.
 
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watzupken

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DirectStorage cuts loading times in Forspoken by about 36% on average.

Significant, but not earth-shattering either. Forspoken also uses Denuvo, which we know impacts loading times in games, and DirectStorage has no effect on that.

Caure.jpg
The % looks big, but in reality, the waiting time is negligible. What is 1.7 seconds? And don't get me wrong, any improvement in load time is good. But with this sort of results, it is not going to send people rushing to get the fastest (sequential read/ write) SSD out there.
 
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doughillman

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why?
if the performance is a mere3seconds load...save $ and get cheaper, larger capacity drive.

might even not need a high end MB since pcie gen 5 has little use now (not even gpu can use all of gen4)

Yeah, I read that and thought, "This must be a typo. Nothing in this article has shown that it makes sense to spend the money on a Gen 5 drive at the moment. In fact, sort the exact opposite."