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Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.1, a feature that uses the GPU to speed up load times, has just been tested with comparisons made between AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics cards – with some very interesting results. In short, the feature seems intended to dramatically increase load times with NVMe SSDs.
As Tom’s Material (opens in a new tab) reports, Compusemble (opens in a new tab) has developed a benchmark test that the German technology site PC Games Hardware (opens in a new tab) (PCGH) used to produce results for AMD’s RX 7900 XT versus Intel’s Arc A770 and also Nvidia’s RTX 4080.
All GPUs were tested on a PC with Intel’s Core i9-12900K (Alder Lake flagship processor) running Windows 11.
First, a quick refresher on technology to refresh your memory if needed: DirectStorage 1.1 comes with GPU decompression technology, so the GPU can handle decompression (of compressed game assets), and do it with much higher speed and efficiency than CPU.
This ushers in faster loading times and faster loading of assets on the fly in large open-world games, which means a smoother experience when roaming around these types of large environments.
In testing, PCGH found that Intel’s A770 GPU was actually the best performer in terms of fast decompression of game resources, hitting 16.8 GB/s compared to 15.3 GB/s for the RTX 4080 and 14 .6 GB/s for AMD’s 7900 XT (for PCIe 4.0 tests – though Intel also leads for PCI 3.0, albeit by a slightly narrower margin).
While this was a somewhat telling win for Intel Arc, it’s important to note that it didn’t translate to any real difference in load times between GPUs, with each delivering super-fast speeds.
PCGH saw 5 second load times reduced to 0.5 seconds – basically a blink – in all cases for these AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics cards, so all were perfectly on par in terms of end results real.
Analysis: Truly impressive results – but where are the games?
This is an exciting first look at independent benchmarks showing just how fast DirectStorage will be for PC gamers, no matter what flavor of (contemporary) GPU they’re using. Note that gamers should have an NVMe SSD and also be running Windows 11 for best results.
While DirectStorage will work with Windows 10 PCs, there are a whole bunch of optimizations for Windows 11 on the storage front which means it will provide a lot more of a boost. So it’s easy to see why, given the impact DirectStorage seems to have on these tests, it will be a compelling argument for PC gamers to upgrade to Windows 11.
Note that this may not be an argument that applies in the real world for a while, simply because there aren’t any games that use DirectStorage yet (not on PC, anyway) . The only game we know of is coming and bristling with DS support is Forspoken, and frustratingly, that’s been the victim of multiple delays now.
Forspoken was due in May 2022, then was delayed to October 2022, before being pushed back to January 24, 2023, just over a week away now. So hopefully – barring any further last-minute delays – we should be able to see DirectStorage in action on the PC very soon.
Even so, a PC game is just a drop in the ocean, and it’s unclear when other titles that use this fast SSD boosting technology will actually arrive. This means that it will still be some time before PC gamers who stick with Windows 10 feel the real value of upgrading to Windows 11, but judging from the first tests so far, it seems that this lure will be important when it comes into effect. player.
