games are going to look better and play better thanks to this new tech powered
by The Humble SSD that might not make any sense like for years we have been
saying that storage speed does not matter for gaming but now that
Microsoft's direct storage API has finally been released to developers that
changes it's now possible for your GPU
to load data directly from your SSD and
it's only a matter of time before games support it but why does it matter where
your GPU gets its data from and how is this going to make your games better and
how am I going to load this sponsor segue directly into your brain dot Tech
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in my opinion direct storage and Sony's
equivalent have always been underrated because we can't turn it off we can't do
a side by side to see how much of a difference it makes so it's always been
this weird nebulous thing that we can't feel you know and now that it's finally
on the PC we can get some real answers now we don't have games to test right
now but Microsoft did give us a peek at what it can do first there's a simple
hello direct storage that's designed to get developers acquainted with the API
but more importantly there's a Mini Engine model viewer this is intended to
show developers the difference direct storage can make when loading assets
with a real world example why don't we have a look for ourselves
is the model viewer what this lets us do is basically show the difference between
direct storage and not direct storage so the SE two commands that I'm cycling
between here have the non-direct storage
and direct storage versions respectively so let's launch the non-direct storage
version first and see how long that takes to load
okay not too bad and we can look around
it's not a very complicated scene it's actually quite
uh quite small for what it is it's not like the Unreal Engine 5 demo
but it is a whole bunch of assets they're
just loaded in here we can see that took 0.33 seconds for everything to start up
now let's go with direct storage
okay you can see the same thing is happening
here we've got the the same overall
set of assets and if we get out
0.08 seconds I cannot overstate how much
of a difference that is this one little scene just 52.4 Megs uncompressed is
loading nearly three times faster now
true we're talking fractions of a second here but expand that out to hundreds of
Megs even multiple gigs of assets loaded
by modern games and that's a lot of time saved but now I have two questions first
how does it save so much time on the same hardware and second how will it
scale with those more detailed game environments in order to understand
what's going on here we have to understand how assets are loaded into
video memory the reality on PC up until today has been that the asset is first
read from Storage to the CPU then Place into system memory your RAM from there
it's copied through the CPU again to the GPU now this sounds like a roundabout
process and as we've seen in our demo it definitely slows things down but up
until the mid-2000s this wasn't a major issue because you'd usually load
everything you needed all at once what changed streaming assets as open worlds
became larger and as consoles available video memory shrank in comparison to PCS
it became increasingly common to need to use more textures and 3D models than
could be held in memory at once this was foreseen as early as 2001 when Sony
filed a patent to seamlessly load game worlds as boundaries are crossed
eliminating the need for reloading screens fast forward to today and
loading screens are seen as an unnecessary inconvenience in an age
where seamless asset streaming is the norm you usually only see the first one
and then again when you die or when you fast travel ever notice how today's
games connect areas with elevators or tunnels or hallways yeah that's why
there have been attempts to help with this over the years compression was one
of the first such Concepts introduced and in fact one of the earliest methods
is still in use today prior to that you had to either shrink the dimensions or
use a color map to reduce the memory footprint of textures and after its
introduction and adoption by the industry it enabled larger more detailed
assets to be loaded more quickly even if they still had to be copied from the CPU
to the GPU compression paved the way for graphics to LEAP out of the crunchy 90s
visuals and into Brown muddy 2000s
visuals hey it was good for the time it also paved the way for another attempt
to improve performance this time in the same way that direct storage does by
cutting the CPU out as much as possible texture atlases effectively rounded up
all the little textures a scene would need and then plopped them into one
giant texture the end result being a dramatic reduction in the number of
textures that needed to be copied to the GPU and more importantly for the time
the number of draw calls that had to be made sounds like a great solution what
do we need direct store search for him all right well texture atlases have some
drawbacks you can't tile them colors will blend together around the edges of
each subtexture in the atlas and perhaps most importantly swapping one or two
individual textures requires swapping out the whole Atlas which is really
inefficient since they're so big the nail in the coffin texture atlases were
becoming a thing around the same time that streaming assets became popular
talk about bad timing direct storage solves all of those problems it allows
the GPU to read directly from Storage without any intervention for the CPU
meaning that an entire copy step is just being removed from the pipeline for each
and every asset loaded this way which as we've seen leads to a significant
reduction in load times that means that not only can game worlds be larger and
more detailed with shorter or even no loading hallways but you won't need a
massive GPU for it either since lower end gpus with less vram will be able to
swap Assets in and out more efficiently I can see game engines becoming more
aggressive in terms of how they tweak asset streaming according to available
vram how maximize the effect and I could see you in a swaget from ltdstore.com
seriously it's comfortable for most of the year and doesn't look half bad
either but what about our second question will direct storage scale for
larger assets well for it to be able to the GPU first needs to fetch the assets
and decompress them this is a problem
well yes I said before that gpus support
compressed assets this is a different type of compression with games being as
massive as they are assets are typically stuffed into giant compressed archives
to save space and for more efficient distribution prior to direct storage the
CPU handle all of this and that was fine because it was all going through the CPU
anyway unfortunately direct storage in its current form doesn't include a way
for the GPU to do that decompression at least not on PC but it is possible
NVIDIA has something similar to how Sony's dedicated PS5 Hardware handles
this which they call rtxio when it's enabled decompression via custom hard
Hardware Via the GPU itself will be significantly faster than it is via the
CPU at all full stop and as a bonus it's
decompressed straight to video memory so that performance boost we saw earlier
will be Amplified because we're skipping two steps instead of just one but as
long as data has to pass through the CPU direct storage won't be super useful
Microsoft says that fixing this is a priority so hopefully we'll see it
before games go live the alternative is games that ship with uncompressed assets
which I mean with how big Call of Duty
has gotten with compression I sure hope
you got a big SSD why is it taking so long though Microsoft has had Direct
storage on Xbox for ages now and we're still getting table scraps on PC well
it's easier to implement a brand new API like this on a fixed platform that you
can control both the hardware and operating system for and consoles are
usually the platforms with the greatest initial lead asset streaming for example
was to my recollection anyway for seriously explored on consoles at a time
when the available vram compared to contemporary PCS was laughable
regardless it was a problem at the end of every generation since then and even
the 8 to 10 gigs of memory that the Xbox series is and the PS5 have is going to
seem extremely Limited in five to ten years to stay relevant for longer than
the Xbox One and PS4 did they need tech like direct storage that will offer game
developers the flexibility they need to crank up the visual Fidelity or create
ever more sprawling open worlds We crave
supporting direct storage on both Windows 10 and 11 is also no easy feat
but Microsoft says that Windows 11 will work better thanks to enhancements to
the storage subsystem something that we're going to have to test in more
detail when games get released get subscribed so you don't miss that by the
way and that's really it it'll be a
while yet before we see games coming out with support on PC but it's getting
really close you guys and when it does finally drop it's legit going to change
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guys go check out our recent video on the Radeon Pro SSG for an earlier
approach to this kind of thing different purpose and didn't quite catch on but
hey you never know what the future holds