Despite its release last March, we haven’t heard much about the new Microsoft DirectStorage API. This system that allows access from SSD to GPU memory directly, it seems that it has not been very successful among developers. But now Microsoft announces us that the new version of this API, Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 is on the way with an important change that it has inherited from the consoles, it will allow extract the compressed data from the SSD and decompress it with the GPU.
Now, in addition to having direct access to the SSD from the GPU memory, you can take this compressed data, to later uncompress them with the GPU. This will relieve the CPU of this load of decompressing the data, while doing it faster. thanks to higher GPU memory speed. In addition, this does not interfere with the performance of the graphics card, since DirectStorage focuses on reduce loading times of the games.
According to the data shown by Microsoft, with DirectStorage 1.1 it has been possible to reduce the loading time from 2.38 seconds to just 0.80 seconds. Time that will also be reduced considerably when we try to load much heavier games where now the data decompression operation will be performed by the GPU.
In addition to the new version 1.1 of this API, it has also introduced a data compression format called GDeflate which is optimized to compress and decompress using the GPU. This has been developed by Microsoft together with NVIDIAbut it is working for take it to all charts through driver updates.
DirectStorage 1.1, along with GDeflate, is expected to end of this same 2022 so that it can be available in the next titles to launch in 2023although it can also be implemented later through a software update.
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