NVIDIA’s RTX IO GPU accelerated storage technology is coming

NVIDIA has declared that the RTX IO GPU accelerated storage technology will make its inaugural appearance in the forthcoming releases of “Portal: Prelude” RTX Edition and “Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart”. Rapid loading and seamless traversing in expansive open-world games have always been an aspiration for players and developers alike. Nevertheless, even the most formidable NVMe SSDs fall short in achieving this objective. Modern game engines have transcended the capabilities of traditional storage APIs, necessitating a novel generation of I/O architecture.

NVIDIA’s RTX IO GPU accelerated storage technology, a derivative of Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, realizes GPU-based quick loading and game resource decompression, thus reducing data processing latency and offloading CPU and other devices. Despite Microsoft’s lack of support for Vulkan API-driven games, a comparable effect can be achieved through NVIDIA’s RTX IO GPU accelerated storage technology.

NVIDIA purports that the RTX IO GPU accelerated storage technology leverages the advanced architecture of the GeForce GPU, relocating tasks traditionally handled by the CPU to the GPU, thereby attaining swifter game-loading speeds. The RTX IO GPU accelerated storage technology is predicated on GDeflate, an open GPU compression standard provided by NVIDIA, which has been adopted by Microsoft’s DirectStorage and new Vulkan Extensions.

Thanks to the application of RTX IO and Vulkan extensions, GPU decompression through GDeflate has enabled a 44% reduction in the installation size of “Portal: Prelude” RTX Edition, facilitating the lossless display of 4K textures in a more compact storage space.

While all GPUs supporting DirectX 12 also support RTX IO, the design premise is to operate on as many parallel cores in the GPU as possible. Consequently, with I/O throughput not constituting a bottleneck, the more available computing cores, the higher the performance. The combination of a more powerful GPU and SSD affords the quickest loading times, the specific improvement is, however, contingent on game optimization, game scenarios, and particular combinations of GPU and SSD.