Before Microsoft had published DirectStorage technology, and was the first to use it on Xbox Series X/S. Microsoft has also brought this technology to PCs, but the previous DirectStorage technology was version 1.0. Although it can speed up NVME SSDs for games, it does not support GPU acceleration, and there are not many games used. Now Microsoft has stated that it will launch version 1.1, which is considered to solve this problem, which also means that Windows 11 is already perfect as a gaming platform. The technical principle of
DirectStorage is actually very simple. Previously, the game data was stored on the hard disk, and then handed over to the CPU processor to decompress it through the video memory. Then the CPU decompresses the game data, and then processed by GPU to finally generate the actual game screen. However, through DirectStorage technology, the GPU can directly access the hard disk and decompress the game data. This skips the step of CPU decompression, which not only frees CPU resources, but also greatly improves game loading speed and reduces game delays.
In fact, this technology NVIDIA has been used, which is the NVIDIA RTX IO technology we are familiar with. Of course, similar technologies of NVIDIA are closed and will not be open to other manufacturers, so there are actually not many games that support NVIDIA technology. However, NVIDIA claims that games that support this technology can increase the speed by up to 100 times compared to other games that use traditional hard drives.
Now Microsoft officially confirms that DirectStorage version 1.1 will fully support GPU compression, so that the game can get rid of its dependence on the CPU. This technology will greatly improve the speed of game resource decompression with the advantages of GPU in parallel computing, so that the loading speed and running speed of the game will be significantly improved. Of course, this also requires the support of game manufacturers. NVIDIA and AMD have no problem supporting this technology on hardware.
Microsoft itself also demonstrated the advantages of DirectStorage 1.1. In Microsoft's test, when this technology was not available, it took 2.36 seconds to load 5.65GB of game resources, and the CPU occupancy rate instantly reached 100%. However, using DirectStorage 1.1, it only took 0.8 seconds, and the performance was directly increased by 30 times, and the CPU occupancy rate was reduced to 15%. In this way, in many games in the future, we will see that the CPU occupancy rate is extremely low. At least when the power consumption of graphics cards increases greatly, the CPU will not seem to become a new source of heat during the game.
DirectStorage is originally included in DX12 Ultimate, so to perfectly support this technology, the graphics card needs to fully support DX12 Ultimate. From this perspective, AMD needs an RDNA 2 graphics card, which is RX 6000; and NVIDIA should support this technology since RTX 20, so users who have purchased new graphics cards in the past two years should not worry. As for earlier graphics cards, it depends on the support of Microsoft and the two major GPU manufacturers.
In the hard disk part, DirectStorage 1.1 supports all hard disks, including HDD and SSD. Of course, HDD's transmission speed is wired, so the improvement may not be too large. It is recommended to use NVME SSD. It is estimated that when the hard disk after PCI-E 3.0, users will not have too obvious differences in the game. As for the supported systems, they include Win10 and Win11, but Win11's performance will be better, and there are more optimizations about IO.
Microsoft did not specify when the DirectStorage 1.1 technology will be updated to the system, nor did it specify when the corresponding API will be pushed to the manufacturer, but this should not be a problem. Since Xbox currently supports this feature, game developers should get APIs soon. For gamers, HDD mechanical hard drives should be completely eliminated in the future, and NVME's SSD is the best hardware for games.
