DirectStorage is Microsoft's way of speeding up game load times and allowing developers to take better advantage of fast SSDs...When DirectStorage actually becomes available, it will be a big step toward more impressive and scalable games No doubt, but even before we have it, Microsoft is making DirectStorage even better.

Following the release of the DirectStorage API in March (opens in new tab) (time flies), Microsoft announced DirectStorage 1.1. Essentially, the new version adds GPU decompression to the proceedings, offloading time-consuming decompression tasks from the CPU to a highly parallel GPU.

Traditionally, compressed game assets are transferred from storage media (now primarily SSDs) to system memory, where the CPU decompresses the assets as needed before transferring them to the GPU.

With DirectStorage 1.1, all of that work can be skipped and a more direct route taken. Assets are transferred from the NVMe SSD (DirectStorage 1.0 already speeds up this process) and directly to the GPU for decompression. Thus reducing asset load times by several seconds or more.

"... Scenes load nearly three times faster, freeing up the CPU almost completely for other game processing," Microsoft confirms.

The end result is that games will load faster on PCs, and as DirectStorage-enabled PCs become more prevalent, developers should be able to push the limits of their games with increased load times, asset quality, and scaling flexibility.

This is the problem, DirectStorage has some requirements, especially DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Decompression:

DirectStorage games are unfortunately not available now. We had hoped to be the first to see this technology in Forspoken, but this game was delayed over the summer until 2023 and DirectStorage was also put off. However, Forspoken is currently scheduled to launch in January, so perhaps it is still for the best.

To make DirectStorage work, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered to introduce a new compression format offered by Nvidia called GDeflate.

This new file format is reported to be lossless, but allows for optimized "high-throughput decompression on the GPU with a Deflate-like compression ratio."

"GDeflate saves CPU cycles by offloading costly decompression processing to the GPU, while simultaneously saving system interconnect bandwidth and on-disk footprint," the Microsoft blog on DirectStorage 1.1 stated.

But don't worry, GDeflate is not proprietary to Nvidia GPUs. you may have heard about Nvidia's proprietary RTX IO technology, which is used in conjunction with DirectStorage. Intel, too, seems to have some plans for DirectStorage, and all three GPU manufacturers (still odd that there are currently three) will support GDeflate. This means that when the time comes, all modern cards should be able to take advantage of the new format.

Since DirectStorage has been available to developers for over a year now, 2023 will probably be the year that we see quite a few games actually supporting this technology. That should coincide with the launch of new GPUs, PCIe 5.0 SSDs, speeded-up CPUs, and all the PC gaming ducks in a row.

You can check to see if your PC supports DirectStorage (opens in new tab) with the Microsoft Game Bar.