Goodbye long game loading times — Microsoft launches DirectStorage 1.1
Microsoft has launched the next iteration of its DirectStorage technology on Windows 11, aiming to make game load times even faster.
Because game assets — like characters, objects, environments, and even colours — can comprise massive amounts of data, developers compress them into smaller packages to decrease overall game sizes.
While playing a game, assets are transferred to system memory as required, where the CPU decompresses the data. That is then copied into GPU memory for rendering.
This happens while players are shown a loading screen, or is sometimes hidden by cutscenes or in-game transition pieces with a low number of elements, allowing for larger environments to be loaded in the background.
One famous example of a hidden loading screen is the elevator sequences in the original Mass Effect.
Microsoft explained the transfer and decompression of assets contributed significantly to load times and limited how much detail could be included in open-world scenes.
The first version of DirectStorage allowed games installed on high-speed NVMe drives to load up to 40% faster by better leveraging their data transfer capabilities.
DirectStorage 1.1 now adds support for GPU decompression, which will let graphics cards take over some of the asset unpacking typically handled by CPUs.
“Graphics cards are extremely efficient at performing repeatable tasks in parallel, and we can utilise that capability along with the bandwidth of a high-speed NVMe drive to do more work at once,” Microsoft said.
“As a result, the amount of time it takes for an asset to load decreases, reducing level load times and improving open world streaming.”
To better illustrate the advantage of DirectStorage 1.1, Microsoft built a highly-optimised sample capable of loading 5.65GB of data in 0.8 seconds using the GPU, compared to 2.36 seconds on a CPU.
GPU with GDeflate (left) loading in 0.8 seconds vs CPU with Zlib (right) in 2.36 seconds
That makes it around three times faster than the typical decompression process. Some of the CPU’s resources can then also be used for other tasks.
Microsoft teamed up with Nvidia to develop a GPU decompression format called GDeflate to support the feature.
“GDeflate saves CPU cycles by offloading costly decompression operations to the GPU, while saving system interconnect bandwidth and on-disk footprint at the same time,” the company said.
Microsoft said the format could be supported and optimised by all vendors and that it was working with AMD, Intel, and Nvidia to provide drivers for GDeflate.
DirectStorage 1.1 is supported on all DirectX 12 capable graphic cards with support for shader model 6.0 running on Windows 10 and Windows 11, but Microsoft said the latter would have “additional optimisations”.
Developers will also have to integrate it into their games’ coding to enable it.
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