Forspoken: Shows advantages of Direct Storage
Direct Storage is a technique that, when used with modern hardware, can significantly reduce game loading times. The feature is already available on the new generation of consoles, and it should be available on the PC soon. The first implementation, Forspoken, has now been demonstrated. More about this can be found further down.
Forspoken is an action role-playing game that will be released in October for PC and PS5. The Luminous engine-powered game is presently the subject of several tech demos at the Game Developer Conference 2022, which is taking place this week.
Variable shading, denoising, SSR, and ambient occlusion are among the features supported by the engine. AMD also revealed yesterday native FSR 2.0 compatibility.
Microsoft has revealed the Direct Storage API's availability for developers last week, which is now being introduced with Forspoken on the PC. The technology compresses and decompresses data on a storage device using the GPU of a PC.
This relieves the CPU and significantly reduces game loading times. The technology is already in use on the Xbox Series S/X and will soon be available on the PC. Forspokens was tested at GDC with an NVMe SSD, a SATA SSD, and a standard hard disk.
The NVMe SSD performed best, with loading times of 1.9 and 1.7 seconds in two test scenes, as expected. The ordinary SATA SSD took nearly twice as long at 3.7 or 3.2 seconds, while the magnetic hard drive took 21.5 or 19.9 seconds, demonstrating why gaming PCs today must be outfitted with SSDs.
After barely a week of making the Direct Storage API available to developers, subsequent implementations will almost definitely take some time. Forspoken, on the other hand, is already in the price comparison and will be available on October 11th.
What does Direct Storage offer?
Direct Storage will be available not just on Windows 11, but also - to a lesser extent - on the predecessor. Appropriately configured PC games should perform better under Windows 10 than games that do not use the new interface. However, according to Microsoft, only Windows 11 will completely benefit from the I/O memory access enhancement.
