DirectStorage Testing Shows PCIe 3 SSDs Are Basically as Fast as PCIe 5
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No baseline results? What’s the load time WITHOUT directstorage enabled?
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No baseline results? What’s the load time WITHOUT directstorage enabled?
DirectStorage cuts loading times in Forspoken by about 36% on average.
Significant, but not earth-shattering either. Forspoken also uses Denuvo, which we know impacts loading times in games, and DirectStorage has no effect on that.
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^ that chart is using a Samsung 990 Pro (PCIe4.0).
Just so people can compare/extrapolate if they want.
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The sample size of DirectStorage games is one, and that game is about as optimized as a plate of spaghetti.
Probably not a great idea to make DirectStorage conclusions based on this one game, alone. -
The built in benchmark doesn’t take into account longterm gameplay where the same files are read thousands of time per hour. Not only that, the game doesn’t use GDeflate.
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so it still makes sense to get a PCIe Gen5 x4 drive for a new build.
why?
if the performance is a mere3seconds load…save $ and get cheaper, larger capacity drive.might even not need a high end MB since pcie gen 5 has little use now (not even gpu can use all of gen4)
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So… If the speed of the drive matters very little, but DS being on or off matters roughly 35-50%, that would imply that the interface is mostly avoiding a bunch of software bloat. And there is only so much bloat that Windows will allow you to remove. Perhaps attach the storage directly to the GPU with a small coprocessor running a stripped little file-access-oriented OS? Remove the problem (Windows) completely. That would be a cool little project!
A lot of changes in Directstorage 1.0 are about software overhead when the GPU has to access assets. You can notice these benefits even when using SATA SSD.
And the major change in DirecStorage 1.1 is GDeflate , that uses the GPU instead of the CPU to decompress assets like textures and shaders. While you do need a regular NVMe SSD to be able to get all those assets to the GPU in a timely manner, a PCIe 3.0 SSD works just fine. The real cut in loading times is due to the GPU doing the decompression instead of the GPU.
The reason why a game won’t load instantly yet, even with DirectStorage 1.1, has nothing to do with hardware anymore. They’re largely network calls, to DRM servers, Denuvo bloat, etc.
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