Microsoft officially launched the DirectStorage API in March 2021, allowing the PC’s NVMe SSD to bypass the CPU and memory and directly transfer data to the video memory, which can greatly reduce the loading time of the game to achieve seamless integration of scenes. Microsoft also updated the DirectStorage API last year,
introducing the “GPU decompression” feature in version 1.1.
DirectStorage 1.1 brings two advantages: one is the faster loading time, allowing the GPU to directly obtain the relevant resources of the game material from the storage device, and use the GPU instead of the CPU for decompression, further reducing the time for data transmission and decompression; the second is to reduce the load on the CPU, allowing related resources to be transferred faster. Many players may wonder whether SSDs with different interface standards will have different experiences in games that support DirectStorage.
Recently,
Compusemble was tested using the game “Forspoken”. The selected storage products include PCIe 5.0 SSD equipped with Phison Electronics E26 controller, Samsung 990 Pro representing PCIe 4.0 SSD, and ADATA XPG SX 8200 Pro representing PCIe 3.0 SSD.
Although on paper, the interface bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 x4 is four times that of PCIe 3.0 x4, from the test results, XPG SX 8200 Pro is only 32% slower than PCIe 5.0 SSD. In the seven scenes of the built-in benchmark test of “Forspoken”, this difference is not obvious. If it is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, there is no difference between it and a PCIe 5.0 SSD. Not only does DirectStorage 1.1 appear to be efficient, but it also blurs the performance lines between these SSDs.
Since there is currently only one game that supports DirectStorage, the actual situation cannot be easily concluded, and it does not mean that it is meaningless to buy PCIe 5.0 SSD. In the future, more games will support DirectStorage. With the deepening of optimization, perhaps the performance of SSD can be better played, and players can truly experience the seamless connection of scenes in the game.
