Tests from PC Games Hardware show that Microsoft’s DirectStorage API can help NVMe SSDs load assets significantly faster than SATA SSDs. They also offer the enormous advantages.
Why it matters: Microsoft’s DirectStorage API promises to bring PCs ultra-fast load times akin to what Xbox Series console and PlayStation 5 users have experienced for two years. As the first game supporting DirectStorage prepares to launch, a benchmark shows real performance gains on retail hardware.
Tests from PC Games Hardware show that Microsoft’s DirectStorage API can help NVMe SSDs load assets significantly faster than SATA SSDs. They also offer the enormous advantages of GPU-based decompression over CPU decompression.
The site ran Microsoft’s publicly available Avocado-loading DirectStorage demo on a SATA SSD, a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD, and a PCIe 4.0 NVMe. It also compared decompression speeds between three GPUs and a CPU —an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, an Intel Arc A770, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080, and a 5.
