What is DirectStorage 1.1 and how does it affect your gaming experience?

DirectStorage 1.1, powered by GPU decompression, has become an important milestone for gaming on the Windows PC platform. According to recent reports, this technology, in combination with popular modern graphics cards, has delivered promising results, hinting at load times of an astonishing 0.5 seconds for video games.

Naturally, the low-level application programming interface, introduced by Microsoft last year, has a lot to offer for gamers. Furthermore, the latest version of DirectStorage is far more effective alongside Windows 11, letting the feature utilize advanced memory stack optimization to optimize loading times.

While DirectStorage isn't a complicated technology to understand, its significant effect on loading time and how it works is certainly worth exploring. Read on to learn more about this feature and how it may affect your gaming experience.

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Exploring DirectStorage 1.1: The API makes use of modern GPUs to deliver incredibly fast load times

DirectStorage was designed with the goal of reducing CPU overhead and increasing IO throughput. Microsoft first introduced this feature back in 2020 and made it available to developers in March 2022. The original idea was to significantly reduce CPU usage in video game decompression by fully utilizing the potential of NVMe SSDs.

Modern video games involve huge amounts of data that are put together to build immersive worlds. Characters, objects, and worlds are created individually and feature high-quality assets, all of which contribute to the final size of the game. Unfortunately, it's currently impossible to ship a game without compressing its total size.

To reduce the package size of a video game before shipping, developers compress these assets. When the game runs on a system, the compressed files are decompressed by the CPU and loaded onto the GPU for further use.

This process of decompression in the CPU before a transfer to the GPU heavily influences the load times for a video game. However, with DirectStorage 1.1, Microsoft's software allows developers to shift the decompression part entirely to the GPU, thereby freeing up the CPU and drastically improving the transfer phase.

DirectStorage 1.1 will work in tandem with the system's OS, GPU, and storage to improve in-game performance and offer ultra-fast load times. It should be noted that the API requires a high-bandwidth NVMe SSD, Windows 11, and a DirectX 12-capable GPU to deliver its highest potential on Windows systems.

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DirectStorage 1.1 is set to kick off a new era of load times and performance in video game development

With DirectStorage 1.1 now available for developers to add into PC games, players will likely see a stark difference in load times going forward. Developers can also overcome major limitations and deliver more detailed assets without compromising on optimization.

As per reports from Compusemble and PC Games Hardware, powerful graphics cards like the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, the Intel Arc A770, and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 were able to deliver much higher asset decompression speeds than the Intel Core i9-12900K CPU, when optimized with DirectStorage 1.1.

It should also be noted that the Intel Arc A770 card achieved the fastest decompression speed in comparison to the Nvidia and AMD cards. Regardless of the GPU being used, the final load time will project DirectStorage's benefits by a significant ratio, from five seconds to half a second.

The aforementioned figures clearly prove the effectiveness of DirectStorage and how developers can use this software as a standard inclusion to drastically improve the expected load times in video games and overall performance. Although most modern video games are yet to utilize DirectStorage, a universal adoption of this feature isn't far off.