News The DirectStorage Advantage: Phison IO+ SSD Firmware Preview

[drajitsh]

I really don't see how using GPU to perform the decompression helps. If we are in the old days where CPUs only have 1-2 cores, I can understand. But today, we have 4-8 or even more cores. So, how does offloading this task to GPU helps? esp. when bottleneck in games is mostly with GPU rather than CPU.

And then, GPU usually have very limited RAM compared to CPU (most cards are just 8GB). So, if part of it has to be used for storing data from SSD, wouldnt there be even less memory available for games?

Btw, the I would say the main benefit of this is due to the queue depth direct storage uses. NAND is known to be slow at low queue depth.

Also, both AMD and Nvidia compress game resources to increase VRAM bandwidth. So, unless you are willing to give up VRAM bandwidth, I would not store temporary uncompressed files on SSD

 

[bit_user]

For my system I went for 2 x16GB Ram because that is where i found the best price/GB ratio.i have DDR3600 C16. I could have gone for 64 GB, but I have not seen my previous system manage to utilise 16 GB @100% in most cases

Random Windows question: My work laptop is running Windows 10 and has 32 GB of RAM. Shortly after booting, Task manager shows it quickly converges on using 16 GB of RAM, but never more. It take very little for it to approach 16 GB, but then pretty much anything I do never seems to push it above 16 GB. Does anyone have any insight into what's happening, here?

 

[bit_user]

Also, both AMD and Nvidia compress game resources to increase VRAM bandwidth. So, unless you are willing to give up VRAM bandwidth, I would not store temporary uncompressed files on SSD

Depending on how loosely one is using the term "compression", it could make sense. If we're talking about caching dynamically-generated content (and this could include things like procedurally-generated geometry), then it could make sense.

However, you're right that it would be a losing proposition to fully decompress textures to the SSD. I'm sure that's not what's going on.

 

[cryoburner]

Idiot question here... if I'm understanding this review right - my Samsung 980 Pro won't quite be good enough to run Forspoken on medium, because it can only stream at 3.5GB/s ?
I actually bought it with Forspoken and DirectStorage in mind, but it looks like it won't be enough? Is this game being gated to only the highest-end consumer SSDs? That can't be right?
Help!! lol.

This is marketing from a company trying to convince people that their updated firmware might potentially be good for DirectStorage games, half a year before the first game utilizing DirectStorage is set to release. It's anyone's guess at this point whether any one drive will perform better than another in games utilizing this technology, or even if Forspoken will showcase it in a meaningful way. It might not even be a good game. And of course, we may see other companies release DirectStorage-optimized firmware for their drives as well. Or perhaps they don't even need it.

At the very least, I find it unlikely that the game would require a "steady 4 GB/s stream from the SSD" for medium settings. In any case, a 980 Pro should allow for up to 7 GB/s sequential reads, assuming it's installed in a system with a PCIe 4.0-capable CPU and motherboard. In a PCIe 3.0 system, it will be capped at 3.5GB/s, though again, it's hard to say at this point whether that would actually be a limitation or not in a game like this.

 

[gggplaya]

This is marketing from a company trying to convince people that their updated firmware might potentially be good for DirectStorage games, half a year before the first game utilizing DirectStorage is set to release. It's anyone's guess at this point whether any one drive will perform better than another in games utilizing this technology, or even if Forspoken will showcase it in a meaningful way. It might not even be a good game. And of course, we may see other companies release DirectStorage-optimized firmware for their drives as well. Or perhaps they don't even need it.

At the very least, I find it unlikely that the game would require a "steady 4 GB/s stream from the SSD" for medium settings. In any case, a 980 Pro should allow for up to 7 GB/s sequential reads, assuming it's installed in a system with a PCIe 4.0-capable CPU and motherboard. In a PCIe 3.0 system, it will be capped at 3.5GB/s, though again, it's hard to say at this point whether that would actually be a limitation or not in a game like this.

If you're buying or building a computer now, it might be beneficial to future proof it with a directstorage optimized drive by spending a few extra bucks. But I'm not going to go out and upgrade my current drives until the first comparison benchmarks and reviews of directstorage on Forspoken come out. No reason to upgrade simply from marketing hype.