Microsoft’s new storage API isn’t in use publicly yet, but its next update is already making news.
DirectStorage is one of those technologies that perpetually seems to be just on the horizon. Except, Microsoft actually launched DirectStorage back in March of this year. You haven’t heard much about it because it simply hasn’t seen adoption in any game titles yet. That will probably change with the latest update, which adds the highly-anticipated GPU decompression feature.
Load times in modern games running from an SSD are already quite short, so we’re not exactly streaming joyful tears over this announcement, but reduced load time is always a good thing. Microsoft of course says that DirectStorage 1.1 will work best on Windows 11 due to «additional optimizations in the I/O stack,» but it will be available on Windows 10, as well.
