As PC gamers, we’re used to getting on the hype train for the next big advancement, only to be let down by what we eventually find out was just marketing. For example, if you recall the Nvidia Turing launch, we saw ray tracing for the first time. It looked absolutely amazing, but we later found out it ran poorly on anything other than the RTX 2080 Ti, and it only worked in a handful of games.
Thankfully, the above might not be the case with DirectStorage, which promises to significantly boost game loading times. It could also allow you to instantly resume a game you were previously playing. It is available on PC now, but no games support it yet. However, some new benchmarks show it dramatically increasing transfer speeds.
The benchmark in question is the publicly available demo for DirectStorage that uses digital avocados. It tests how fast data can be transferred, and also shows CPU usage to gauge whether the CPU or GPU is doing the heavy lifting. This round of tests was performed by German site PCgameshardware.de (via TechSpot.) What’s notable is the site tested three different GPUs along with all the relevant SSD families, giving us a good look at how each performs in DirectStorage.
For GPUs, it tested an Intel A770, Radeon RX 7900 XT, and an RTX 4080; storage included a SATA drive, plus PCI 3.0 as well as 4.0 drives. For DirectStorage, you only need a PCIe 3.0 drive, but it’s recommended to use the fastest drive possible, and NVME is required as well. Although it’s supported in Windows 10, it has more features in Windows 11 because of how the new storage stack was designed. It’s also a DirectX 12-only feature, and games have to be made with support for it, so it’ll only appear in future titles.
DirectStorage benchmarks show the amount of data transferred in GB/s. (Image: PCgameshardware.de)
With those caveats out of the way, the new benchmarks show the wide gulf in transfer speeds between SATA and PCIe drives. None of the GPUs were able to transfer data faster than 2GB/s, whereas the PCIe drives scored between 15 and 16GB/s. A big part of the disparity is NVME drives and DirectStorage allow for up to 35,000 requests a second instead of just hundreds. SATA drives also only have a single queue that can hold 32 requests. NVME drives have 64,000 queues, and each one of those can handle 64,000 requests. It’s also interesting that Intel’s GPU was the fastest in these tests despite being the least powerful in general.
This demo screen shows assets loading very fast while barely using the CPU (Image: PCgameshardware.de)
Aside from the transfer speeds, there are also screenshots of the various GPUs running the test. This gives us a way to see the CPU usage and how long it took to transfer various amounts of data. The one that really shows off DirectStorage is above. In some screenshots, we can see 100% CPU utilization for the demo. However, for this run, it’s at a mere 3.88% while still loading over 9GB of assets in under a second. In other tests, it took as long as five seconds to load a similar amount of data.
We’ll have to wait and see in-game benchmarks before we break out the champagne. Loading avocados isn’t exactly the same as running a game. But it looks promising, and the first game to support it is right around the corner: Square Enix’s Forspoken, which launches on Jan. 24. One of its developers already said DirectStorage will allow for “one-second load times.”
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