Microsoft's DirectStorage technology has made its first PC release thanks to Forspoken, and according to new tests, the feature not only drastically increases load times (for those with the right hardware), but also frame rates on the game in certain scenarios.
Neowin (opens in a new tab) pointed to a YouTube video (opens in a new tab) in which Compusemble tested Forspoken and observed that: "DirectStorage has a pretty significant effect on frame rate, time consistency, image and GPU usage at 1080p, while having virtually no effect at higher resolutions.
What seems to be happening here, Compusemble explains, is that DirectStorage is only stepping in like this to boost framerates when the game is CPU-limited, which means that the CPU is struggling with its workload, while the graphics card works fine.
This is the case when playing Forspoken at 1080p (Full HD resolution) for Compusemble, but when the resolution increases to 1440p, the YouTuber becomes rather GPU-limited, and the increased frame rate of the images fades away. the air.
Testing was performed using a Sabrent Rocket 7700 Plus-G SSD (XNUMXTB) in a gaming PC with an RTX XNUMX Ti graphics card and a Ryzen XNUMX XNUMXX processor. Remember, to take full advantage of DirectStorage, you need an NVMe SSD. On top of this, running Windows XNUMX runs better than Windows XNUMX (test PC was running Windows XNUMX).
Analysis: A new GPU decompression technology at work? This is not the case, really...
We knew that DirectStorage would do more than just speed up load times, and make a difference in large open-world scenarios, by optimizing the loading of in-game resources on the fly. But it's the first tantalizing evidence that the technology can actually boost framerates on the PC, at least in certain scenarios, i.e. when the GPU isn't sweating but the CPU is hammering away.
So that might make you think that this is clear evidence that the GPU decompression technology in DirectStorage XNUMX, the latest version used by Forspoken, comes into play here. This leaves the GPU to handle the decompression of game assets (which are compressed for size reasons), and the graphics card can do this considerably more efficiently than the CPU, helping to calm down the latter when it has problems and Therefore, it improves the frame rate in CPU-limited scenarios.
That's the obvious theory, but as Digital Foundry points out separately (opens in a new tab), even though Forspoken uses DirectStorage XNUMX, supposedly GPU decompression isn't active here, due to the fact that "there are no spikes in the GPU compute usage when the game does a dedicated load" (though obviously there should be if the card was busy with decompression work).
It's kind of weird overall, and as Digital Foundry (and others) have observed, there are quite a few crashes and glitches with Forspoken on PC. (That's not exactly strange with games that are subject to multiple lags, and indeed with console ports, it must be said.)
The conclusions we can draw from a single game are naturally limited, but we can say that if these are the results without using GPU decompression, it's exciting to imagine what other games using this technology could do for frame rates. (at least away from high resolutions). While that excitement is tempered somewhat when we think about what might be the next game to use DirectStorage on PC, which, well, isn't entirely clear yet.
We just don't know just what games are going to be compatible with the Windows platform after Forspoken, which is somewhat alarming when it comes to waiting for a second title, hopefully with an even better implementation of DS eleven, it could be long. But next year, perhaps DirectStorage could become a compelling reason for gamers to upgrade to Windows XNUMX if they haven't already made the jump from Windows XNUMX.