Fortunately, the performances are also much more stable and ultimately barely lower than what we observe without DirectStorage.
If, in the past, the SSD was a small revolution, it must be recognized that recent developments (NVMe) only bring real gains in very specific conditions.
DirectStorage finally deployed
While the PlayStation 5, for example, claims to exploit the 3, 4 or even 5 GB / s of the most recent SSDs, it was high time for the PC to get up to speed and that is the whole point of the DirectStorage technology.
In principle, DirectStorage makes it possible to transfer graphics data from the SSD to the video memory of the graphics card without any intervention from the main processor. We then avoid unnecessary detours and take advantage of the speed of the GPU, which is more comfortable processing this data.
So relieved of part of the work, the CPU can turn to other tasks and the GPU being more designed to decompress and then process everything related to the display, performance is increased. Well, that’s in theory.
A better average in SATA
For now, only one PC game is able to use DirectStorage, it is the very recent Forspoken published by Square Enix. Relayed by Tom’s Hardware the tests of PC Games Hardware allow a first provisional assessment.
As you can see from the table above, this balance sheet is not very good at first glance. On an otherwise identical configuration, we even observe a drop in average performance of around 10% between a machine with a SATA SSD and two others with NVMe SSD.
The difference is around 8 frames per second, but it’s actually not that dramatic, because on the least fluid 1% of the bench, the average is almost identical: in other words, the speed of animation is certainly lower in the best case, but it is also much more stable.
Note that the least fluid 0.2% even allows the NVMe SSD to be in front. If the overall result remains disappointing, let’s not forget that this is the first time that DirectStorage has been implemented and we don’t know when in the development of Forspoken the thing was integrated.
Source : PC Games Hardware, TOm’s Hardware
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