Diablo 4 developers have confirmed that although DirectStorage files already exist in the game, they do not utilize game-changing SSD technology. Yet. Our intrepid Katie heard specifically that it is planned for the future.

"MS DirectStorage is not currently enabled," says the Diablo team.

It was reported that around the time of the March beta, files for DirectStorage were found in game files installed on people's machines, along with DLSS.

Since then, nothing has been heard about its implementation, leaving Forspoken with the distinction of being the only game actually released that uses Microsoft's SSD utilization technology, the only one included with Forspoken.

DirectStorage is intended to actually leverage the power and performance of solid state drives, especially those running on the high-bandwidth NVMe protocol, in games. Previously, game developers had to deal with the slowest denominator, as many existing systems, especially consoles, still used hard disk drives.

However, with the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 all shipping with NVMe SSDs as standard equipment, and their use in gaming PCs becoming nearly ubiquitous, it is about time that this technology is put to better use. The result should be both faster load times (only 1 second in one possible example) and reduced resource load on the CPU.

When pulling information from solid state storage, such as textures and other image data, the processor can be removed from the equation almost entirely. However, such GPU hardware-based decompression has so far not worked at all.

All of this makes DirectStorage a rather exciting technology, offering an open world with the promise of fast streaming high-resolution textures and no loading screens anywhere. Perhaps that is why, hopefully, Starfield will be the first game to come out with SSD as a minimum requirement.

In my opinion, it's about time.