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As the years have gone by, we've gone from having painfully slow mechanical hard drives

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in our computers to super fast SSDs. But there's one area where SSDs are still frustrating.

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Have you ever noticed in modern games how you still have to deal with long loading times,

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even though we now have consumer level SSDs that are rated to deliver speeds of up to

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2GB per second? What's up with that?

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Before we get into the answer, it's worth pointing out that this is a problem that both

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Microsoft and Sony are trying to address with their upcoming Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles.

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Microsoft calls its version of the improved SSD technology direct storage,

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while Sony doesn't appear to have a name for its solution.

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But both companies are ultimately trying to reduce the amount of time it takes

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for data to go from the SSD to the GPU.

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You see, all the data your GPU needs to process is contained in your video memory or VRAM,

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which is fed by game data stored on the SSD.

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The GPU has to ask the SSD for this data by making what's called an

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input output or IO request whenever it needs a chunk of information.

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And although modern SSDs are super fast, especially for using PCI Express,

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there's a lot of overhead that comes with all these IO requests from the GPU.

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This is because while SSDs can handle lots of raw data,

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the APIs they use to move data around are still fairly old school

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and can't handle enough IO requests at once to take advantage of all that sweet, sweet bandwidth.

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Direct storage addresses this issue in a couple of ways.

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One, it cuts out the CPU to a large extent. Conventionally, the CPU has acted as a middleman between storage and the video memory.

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So the idea is that by linking the storage more directly to the VRAM

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and allowing the GPU to handle the decompressing of visual data rather than the CPU,

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you won't have as much overhead. Two, it more efficiently parallelizes IO requests.

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So the system can handle more of them at once. This should give you the benefit of not only having your games load more quickly,

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but also help eliminate immersion breaking side effects,

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like how distant visual elements kind of suddenly pop into view

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if they can't be pulled from storage fast enough. Developers have often used tricks like separating different parts of a level

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with elevators or narrow hallways to give the game's environment time to load

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away from the player's view. But the hope is that with better GPU access to the SSD,

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this will no longer be necessary, and developers will be able to create more expansive worlds

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that are ultimately more enjoyable for gamers. Sony's technology for the PlayStation 5 is going to operate in a fairly similar fashion

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with a more direct path between the SSD and the VRAM,

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and it also utilizes PCI Express 4.0 for speeds of up to 5 gigabytes per second.

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So you should get a better experience no matter which console you pick.

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Of course, I know tons of you don't bother with consoles and you game mostly on your PC,

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but you don't have to feel left out as Microsoft has announced it's bringing the direct storage paradigm to Windows 10.

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To take advantage of it, the game needs to support direct storage individually,

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and you have to have a compatible graphics card though.

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The good news is that it appears that NVIDIA's new RTX 3000 series GPUs

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will work with direct storage. AMD's forthcoming Big Navi is also rumored to support the feature,

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so fingers crossed you'll get to enjoy a more seamless experience across platforms.

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Unless, of course, you only game on the Nintendo Switch.