The site quotes an anonymous member of the Diablo 4 development team as saying: “MS DirectStorage is not currently enabled, but we plan to enable it in the future.” A Windows feature that borrows technology from Microsoft’s Xbox game console that uses SSD storage. This technology allows Windows game developers to take advantage of SSDs on PCs, resulting in faster load times, higher frame rates, and better performance.

Currently, the only PC game to support DirectStorage is Square Enix’s Forspoken, which launches in January 2023 on a Windows 11-only PC at a lower 1080p resolution using a DirectStorage-capable PC When running the game, the frame rate is much higher than on a PC that does not support this technology.

Recently, Microsoft released the DirectStorage 1.2 version, adding new features such as buffered input and output modes, which means that games that support DirectStorage can use traditional mechanical hard drives (HDDs) and SSDs to improve game performance. Hopefully, when Diablo 4 adds support for DirectStorage in a future update, it will be able to take advantage of the new 1.2 feature to benefit a wider variety of PCs, and hopefully, more games will support this feature.

Besides Diablo 4, the only other game that says it will support DirectStorage in a future update is Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown, as that game will be upgraded to the CryEngine 5.11 engine, which will also add support for DirectX 12 Support for other features.

It is worth mentioning that in March this year, netizens dug into the beta version of Diablo 4 and found files related to Microsoft DirectStorage, suggesting that the game will support DirectStorage.

The post Diablo 4 developers revealed that the game will support Microsoft DirectStorage technology appeared first on TechGoing.

The picture attached to IT Home is as follows. You can see that in the “Diablo 4” game folder, there are two files named dstorage.dll and dstoragecore.dll.

Blizzard officials have not issued any statement on whether to support DirectStorage. If confirmed, Diablo 4 will become the second game to support Microsoft’s DirectStorage, following Luminous Productions’ Forspoken.

Microsoft introduced the DirectStorage API for Windows PC in 2020, which is based on Xbox’s Velocity architecture and is designed to maximize gaming performance and throughput, optimizing modern storage interfaces (such as based on PCIe Gen4/5 and NVMe). More introductions can be found here.

The post Diablo 4 is second game to support Microsoft DirectStorage appeared first on TechGoing.

Compusemble, a foreign oil tube channel, tested PCIe 3, PCIe 4 and PCIe 5 NVMe SSDs on the first video game to support DirectStorage, Forspoken, and found that the difference in game load times between PCIe 4 and PCIe 5 was not significant.

Compusemble conducted benchmark tests on PCIe 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 SSDs using Land of Enchantment using the pre-release Phison E26 reference platform.

The PCIe 4.0 results were essentially the same as the PCIe 5.0, with a difference of just a fraction of a second.

PCIe 3.0 x4 has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 4GB/sec, and PCIe 3.0 SSDs can maintain the necessary 2.4GB/sec throughput as specified by DirectStorage.

The post Microsoft DirectStorage’s game load times on PCIe 4 and PCIe 5 SSDs are not much different appeared first on TechGoing.

Tests from PC Games Hardware show that Microsoft’s DirectStorage API can help NVMe SSDs load game material significantly faster than SATA SSDs. they also provide a huge advantage of GPU-based decompression over CPU decompression.

The site runs Microsoft’s publicly available Avocado loading DirectStorage demo on SATA SSDs, PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe. It also compares decompression speeds between three GPUs and CPUs – AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, Intel Arc A770, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080, and 5.2GHz Intel i9-12900K.

The chart below shows the transfer rates in GB/s for each hardware configuration, showing the average results across the five tests. Here, the NVMe SSD is several times faster than the SATA SSD, while PCIe 4.0 has a slight advantage over PCIe 3.0. Perhaps most curiously, the A770 outperforms the RX 7900 XT and 4080 in terms of GPU decompression, even though it is the underdog in terms of gaming performance.

The screenshots in the demo show the difference between CPU and GPU decompression. Some screenshots show several gigabytes of material taking between 1.5 and 5 seconds to load, with CPU utilization ranging from 30% to 100%. Others show the same material loading in about half a second with less than 5% CPU utilization, indicating that the GPU has taken over the job.

The demo showed promising early results for hardware outside of Microsoft Labs. In addition, they showed a huge shift in 2020 testing, showing that recent games have not taken full advantage of the bandwidth benefits of NVMs over SATA drives.

At GDC in March, Square Enix claimed that DirectStorage allowed Forspoken to load new scenarios and environments in less than 2 seconds on NVMe SSDs, compared to a few seconds on SATA SSDs and nearly half a minute on HDDs. Microsoft has designed new APIs for Windows 11. Windows 10 systems will see only limited benefits due to its legacy storage stack.

The post DirectStorage benchmarks show clear transfer speed improvements appeared first on TechGoing.

However, there has been some positive news surrounding the technology as well. In a recent “Ask Unreal” Q&A session, Brian Karis, a graphics engineering fellow at Epic Games, confirmed that Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) will receive DirectStorage support from Microsoft.

While no specific timeline was given in the meantime, Karis offered an idea of how the technology could help shape UE5 and the next generation of games based on it. He explained that DirectStorage could help implement virtual textures (VTs) once the next-generation storage API is properly supported by Nanite, Unreal Engine 5’s virtualized geometry system. Although not a necessary requirement, the UE5 documentation on Nanite also suggests using VT to implement next-generation geometry.

Q: Are there any plans to integrate DirectStorage directly into the engine?

A: Yes, there are, although I can’t comment on when. When the UE file system supports DirectStorage well, Nanite and VT will use it first.

From the available demos, Unreal Engine 5 looks very impressive and combined with DirectStorage’s greatly improved I/O throughput, etc., the two could be a match made in heaven.

The post Epic Games confirms Unreal Engine 5 will provide support for Microsoft DirectStorage appeared first on TechGoing.