NVIDIA RTX IO GPU accelerated storage technology: Game loading speed increased by up to 50%

Last week, NVIDIA officially announced that their RTX IO GPU-accelerated storage technology will make its debut in the upcoming releases of “Portal Prelude” RTX version and “Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart”. This technology achieves rapid loading and game resource decompression based on the GPU, significantly reducing data processing latency and the load on the CPU and other devices.

Recently, Digital Foundry was given the opportunity to experience this innovative technology firsthand in the RTX version of “Portal Prelude”, discovering that it can substantially enhance the in-game loading times of solid-state drive hardware, slashing these times by half.

During a gaming test employing the Core i9-12900K and RTX 4090 in tandem with a 500MB/s SATA 3 solid-state drive, Digital Foundry found that employing RTX IO GPU-accelerated storage could augment the game loading speed in “Portal: Prelude” by approximately 50%. Without RTX IO GPU-accelerated storage (using a dedicated game testing version), the game loading time stood at 2.36 seconds; however, upon activation of RTX IO GPU-accelerated storage, the time taken to complete game loading was reduced to a mere 1.16 seconds. Switching the SATA 3 solid-state drive for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe solid-state drive quickens the game’s loading speed even further, shaving off an additional 90 milliseconds. Furthermore, RTX IO also offers substantial acceleration for SATA 3 drives, enabling slower SATA 3 drives to outpace the game-loading speed of PCIe 3.0 NVMe solid-state drives with RTX IO disabled.

Through practical testing, the RTX IO GPU-accelerated storage technology demonstrated its potential in gaming applications by enhancing disk performance and reducing game loading times by a full second. Naturally, this is just a glimpse into the capabilities of RTX IO GPU-accelerated storage technology. The RTX version of “Portal: Prelude” is merely a mod based on a 15-year-old game, and apart from reducing game loading times, employing RTX IO doesn’t result in any other tangible effects. However, the forthcoming PC version of “Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart”, set to release this week, will be the first game to truly harness RTX IO GPU-accelerated storage technology, and it’s anticipated to deliver additional practical benefits through this technology.