DirectStorage is Now Available on PC

Microsoft announced today that DirectStorage is now supported in PC games running on Windows 10 and 11.

“Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage,” Microsoft’s Cassie Hoef writes in the announcement post. “This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games by allowing developers to more fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices.”

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Microsoft announced that it would bring the Xbox Series X|S-based DirectStorage technologies to Windows 10 back in September 2020, but it since decided to ship Windows 11, so the plans changed somewhat. Now, DirectStorage will still work on Windows 10, but gamers who want the best experience should upgrade to Windows 11, which offers vague storage optimization advantages. “Windows 11 is our recommended path for gaming,” Hoef says.

Microsoft will have more to say about PC games that support DirectStorage at GDC next week, where Forspoken developer Luminous will give a presentation about their port.

“This release of DirectStorage provides developers everything they need to move to a new model of IO for their games, and we’re working on even more ways to offload work from the CPU,” Hoef adds. “GPU decompression is next on our roadmap, a feature that will give developers more control over resources and how hardware is leveraged. Additionally, we will continue optimizing, integrating feedback, and improving on the existing runtime implementation.”

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Conversation 3 comments

  • blue77star

    14 March, 2022 - 8:49 pm

    <p>Useless next to RAM</p>

  • madthinus

    Premium Member
    15 March, 2022 - 2:38 am

    <p>The part that is still being quiet about it is the client side needs to support this API. Will it just work on all SSD’s like the normal IO protocol in Windows or does it require special controllers / drives. All we have to date on this topic is a drive with supported drivers. </p>

  • pwingert

    15 March, 2022 - 7:54 am

    <p>I just wish they would fix iSCSI, so it doesn’t time out on a NAS connection and have to be disconnected deleted, and reconfigured to fix it.</p>

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