Whether you’re a casual weekend player or a hardcore gamer looking to go pro, you’re all too familiar with one of the biggest roadblocks to seamless gameplay—the load screen. While in the past, load screen times were long enough to take a decent bio break, that’s been evolving over the past few years as gaming rigs get faster and workarounds are discovered. But now, a new solution could virtually eliminate that load lag altogether for Windows PCs, with Microsoft’s DirectStorage for Windows API.
What is the DirectStorage API?
The DirectStorage for Windows Application Programming Interface (API) is Microsoft’s latest innovation focused on improving the gaming experience. First seen in Microsoft’s Xbox Velocity architecture implemented in the Series S and X gaming consoles, the technology provides an optimized file I/O and GPU resource loader through an API developed for modern hardware.
To get a better understanding of what that means, consider this: when a game loads on your PC, it really only loads a portion of that game, much like a chapter of a movie. That chunk of data is loaded into DRAM so you can play through that chapter without any lags. As soon as you’ve completed your objectives, however, and are ready to move to the next chapter or to a new location on the world map, the current data needs to be removed and that next chapter or area needs to be loaded into DRAM—hence, the load screen.
The goal of DirectStorage is to move away from the need to load game data into DRAM because of its size limitations. Theoretically, if DRAM had enough capacity, the system could load the entire game for seamless play. Most gaming PCs only have a few GB of DRAM, anywhere from 16 GB on the low end to a high end of 64 GB, which can cost around $600 today.
For approximately $120, you can get a 1 TB SSD, which is much more capacity at a much lower price. DirectStorage uses the SSD as a data cache rather than DRAM, so caches can be measured in TBs instead of mere GBs.
Streaming for seamless gameplay
Playing a game enabled by DirectStorage will give players an experience closer to streaming a movie on Netflix. Streaming a movie is very different from downloading an entire data file of a movie to watch on a device. Streaming means movie data is delivered “just in time” to display on your screen with a small buffer between the transfer and your monitor. That allows you to begin watching a movie instantly, on demand, with no load times.
Instead of downloading chunks of game data to DRAM, DirectStorage will stream required game textures and other data from the SSD just in time to display the image on your screen. SSDs are so fast that games can kick off predictive reads, guessing what players might need in the next few seconds, and dropping the data that isn’t needed. In the old model, games typically targeted 100 MB/s of sustained bandwidth. With DirectStorage, that target becomes 2400 MB/s—24 times faster.
Say in your game you jump onto your mount to head to the next town. The system will dump the current town’s data and set up for the town you’re heading to. If you suddenly decide to go back to the first town—you forgot to replenish supplies, for instance—the system can pivot fast enough to tee data back up for that location.
DirectStorage uses the speed and high performance of SSDs to take some of the burden off the CPU. The DirectStorage system uses the GPU to carry out the data compression and decompression tasks. When the CPU had to do that work, it used up valuable resources and often led to latency.
Loading times aren’t the only aspect that gets improved with DirectStorage. It can also greatly enhance texture streaming. When it comes to graphic textures in a game, there’s no such thing as too much detail. DirectStorage can render highly detailed textures and push them out much farther than players are used to today. That helps make the gameworld feel even more real.
Manufacturers help bring DirectStorage to life
With DirectStorage delivered as an API, making the most of it will require that game and PC component vendors get on board and optimize their products and solutions to use the technology.
For instance, AMD—a leading provider of CPU, GPU and chipsets—has been in close collaboration with Microsoft, game studios and Phison to ensure that DirectStorage capabilities are available on their entire software and hardware stack. One notable result of that collaboration is SmartAccess Storage, a bundle of technologies that significantly improve load times by speeding up texture streaming and data decompression.
Nvidia is another company aiming to optimize systems to use DirectStorage. Their RTX IO suite, announced back in late 2020, is expected to deliver almost-instantaneous game loads, higher frame rates, better texture streaming and reduced in-game stuttering. The company says that DirectStorage and RTX IO, either on their own or (preferredly) together, will enable heavier compression in games, which will decrease overall game sizes.
Of course, all of this innovative technology and advanced capabilities are useless if the games themselves aren’t built to take advantage of them. That’s why the gaming industry and players alike are highly anticipating the October release of Forspoken, a high-action role-playing game developed by Luminous Productions and published by Square Enix.
Features and benefits of DirectStorage
AMD reports that DirectStorage includes the following features to improve a game’s I/O performance:
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- I/O batching – maximizes throughput with multiple simultaneous workloads
- Asynchronous execution – simplifies asynchronous queuing, dispatch and notification of I/O requests and transfers
- Request prioritization – developers can prioritize requests to deliver the smoothest game-playing experience
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With the DirectStorage API, load times are almost nonexistent. That’s because the game only needs to load textures relevant to the player’s starting area, not the whole “chapter,” as before. Other benefits include higher frame rates, more detailed and faster texture streaming, and smaller game sizes.
In addition, GPU makers can put more of the cost of making the graphics card into the actual GPU instead of the GDDR (GPU DDR or RAM). (Traditionally, GDDR memory accounts for nearly 50% of the video card’s component cost.) And instead of being limited to just 16–32 GB of GDDR, gamers get an SSD with up to 4 TB capacity to store all the graphics—which are fetched just in time.
Technical requirements and support for DirectStorage
As of now, Windows 11 offers full support for DirectStorage. Windows 10 offers partial support, but it’s unclear at this point what limits will be imposed.
To take full advantage of the capabilities of DirectStorage, you’ll need a 1 TB or larger NVMe SSD. While performance advantages max out at 2 TB because it’s related to the number of NAND die up to a point, heavy gamers might still benefit from a 4 TB SSD simply for the storage capacity.
You’ll also need to use Microsoft’s standard NVMe driver, as RAID is currently not supported, and DirectX 12 hardware support.
When it comes to video cards, right now you can choose between AMD’s SmartAccess Storage and Nvidia’s RTX IO, although it’s certain that other manufacturers will get in on the game once DirectStorage begins to flex its muscles and gamers see real-life performance gains.
Phison delivers SSD performance optimized for gaming
To read data from the SSD, the DirectStorage API uses parallel I/O. Phison’s E18 SSD delivers the highest performance in this high-queue-depth read workload, with up to 7500 MB/s transfer speeds. The company’s SSDs take gaming requirements seriously, and can handle heavy gaming workloads such as install, texture streaming, game patching and bulk loads.
Phison, through its partnership with AMD, has also been part of the vanguard in developing technology suites that will make DirectStorage tomorrow’s standard for gaming storage.
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