The latest DirectStorage update is about making things easier for developers, which could mean more games make use of it.
Most of the discussion around Microsoft’s DirectStorage API has been centered around games and how it can drastically reduce their load times when paired with fast NVMe SSDs. DirectStorage as an API actually works on any kind of storage device, though, and it offers reduced overhead even on old spinning rust. However, getting the best performance from both SSDs and HDDs required separate code paths for each type of device.DirectStorage 1.2 is now available, and one of the key changes in this revision is that developers can configure a setting which enables—indeed, forces—the use of buffered accesses, which can help mask relatively-long hard drive seek times. This allows developers to simply toggle on this setting when loading from a hard drive instead of having to write an entire second codepath for disk accesses.BypassIO is the main benefit of DirectStorage on SSDs, but can be slower on HDDs.
