DirectStorage is making its way to PC so that game devs can take advantage of fast NVME SSDs. But what exactly does it do, and should you care?
Although games certainly benefit from high-speed storage devices like SSDs, diminishing returns kick in pretty quickly; It’s hard to tell the difference between an old SATA SSD and a cutting edge PCIe Gen 4 SSD in most games. In order to take advantage of increasingly faster SSDs like never before, Microsoft launched DirectStorage for the Xbox Series X, and now DirectStorage is making its way to PC. While DirectStorage is certainly exciting for game developers, what it means for gamers isn’t quite as exciting, at least not at the moment. DirectStorage is basically a new piece of software that enables games to take advantage of fast NVMe SSDs. This isn’t just to reduce loading times, though. As games become increasingly complex, better hardware is needed to run them, and that’s not limited to CPUs and GPUs: Fast SSDs are becoming increasingly important for good gaming performance. Modern game engines are developed from older technologies that were designed to load in a lot of data all at once, which played to the strengths of hard drives. But nowadays, game developers want to load many small pieces of data over a longer period of time. For example, in many games, far-away objects are not loaded in full detail in order to make the game run better. SSDs are really good at handling many requests for data, also called IO requests, and devs are beginning to optimize for SSDs. The key weakness of DirectStorage’s predecessors is that there is a limit to how many times a game can make IO requests of the storage. Because HDDs were bad at handling lots of IO requests, this limitation wasn’t important until devs wanted to harness the power of modern NVMe SSDs, which are very good at handling thousands or even tens of thousands of IO requests per second.
