[SOLVED] How will DirectStorage eliminate level loading in games?

wr3zzz

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Dec 31, 2007
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I've been reading up about DirectStorage but still not sure how level loading can be eliminated. My understanding is that DirectStorage just bypass the CPU and allows the game assets to decompress in GPU. However, most of the level loading wait time is waiting for SSD/HDD. So unless we all start buying 48GB graphic cards to have enough VRAM to store the gaming assets, how is DirectStorage going to eliminate level loading wait time?
 
Solution
Unlike consoles PC always have a bigger DRAM budget than VRAM so why do we have to wait for NVMe and PCIe4 for this to work?
It's not the same pool of ram, having something on system ram means that the cpu will have to retrieve it from dram and send it to vram, all this after the CPU already did that from disk to dram.
With direct I/O the data will go from disk directly to vram without much need from the CPU and without the reroute through the system ram.

Nvme will just make this much faster,I don't think it will be required although it might not make a lot of difference with slow disks.
It's not going to eliminate it but it's going to decrease it by a lot.
If a game is specially optimized for the new consoles then the loading times will be so close to zero that you could call them eliminated but in general it's going to be a good upgrade even on PC, with a fast nvme drive that nvme drive will basically act as a cache for the GPU, slower than onboard ram but still a huge boost if you manage it correctly.
 

wr3zzz

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2007
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18,610
It's not going to eliminate it but it's going to decrease it by a lot.
If a game is specially optimized for the new consoles then the loading times will be so close to zero that you could call them eliminated but in general it's going to be a good upgrade even on PC, with a fast nvme drive that nvme drive will basically act as a cache for the GPU, slower than onboard ram but still a huge boost if you manage it correctly.

That's the part I don't get. What I read is that the consoles and DirectStorage does this by having the gaming assets packaged in bigger blocks which are then sent directly to GPU for processing and so claimed that with NVMe over PCIe4 this could virtually eliminate the overhead. However, the biggest overhead is not between the CPU and GPU but the IO overhead of needing to read lots of small files from storage. It seems the biggest benefit comes from having the gaming assets packaged in bigger blocks. Having these assets sitting in DRAM won't be faster than in VRAM but they surely would be much faster than needing to retrieve them individually from SSD/HDD. Unlike consoles PC always have a bigger DRAM budget than VRAM so why do we have to wait for NVMe and PCIe4 for this to work?
 
Unlike consoles PC always have a bigger DRAM budget than VRAM so why do we have to wait for NVMe and PCIe4 for this to work?
It's not the same pool of ram, having something on system ram means that the cpu will have to retrieve it from dram and send it to vram, all this after the CPU already did that from disk to dram.
With direct I/O the data will go from disk directly to vram without much need from the CPU and without the reroute through the system ram.

Nvme will just make this much faster,I don't think it will be required although it might not make a lot of difference with slow disks.
 
Solution