As the years have gone by, we've gone from having painfully slow mechanical hard drives
in our computers to super fast SSDs. But there's one area where SSDs are still frustrating.
Have you ever noticed in modern games how you still have to deal with long loading times,
even though we now have consumer level SSDs that are rated to deliver speeds of up to
2GB per second? What's up with that?
Before we get into the answer, it's worth pointing out that this is a problem that both
Microsoft and Sony are trying to address with their upcoming Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles.
Microsoft calls its version of the improved SSD technology direct storage,
while Sony doesn't appear to have a name for its solution.
But both companies are ultimately trying to reduce the amount of time it takes
for data to go from the SSD to the GPU.
You see, all the data your GPU needs to process is contained in your video memory or VRAM,
which is fed by game data stored on the SSD.
The GPU has to ask the SSD for this data by making what's called an
input output or IO request whenever it needs a chunk of information.
And although modern SSDs are super fast, especially for using PCI Express,
there's a lot of overhead that comes with all these IO requests from the GPU.
This is because while SSDs can handle lots of raw data,
the APIs they use to move data around are still fairly old school
and can't handle enough IO requests at once to take advantage of all that sweet, sweet bandwidth.
Direct storage addresses this issue in a couple of ways.
One, it cuts out the CPU to a large extent. Conventionally, the CPU has acted as a middleman between storage and the video memory.
So the idea is that by linking the storage more directly to the VRAM
and allowing the GPU to handle the decompressing of visual data rather than the CPU,
you won't have as much overhead. Two, it more efficiently parallelizes IO requests.
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,
but also help eliminate immersion breaking side effects,
like how distant visual elements kind of suddenly pop into view
if they can't be pulled from storage fast enough. Developers have often used tricks like separating different parts of a level
with elevators or narrow hallways to give the game's environment time to load
away from the player's view. But the hope is that with better GPU access to the SSD,
this will no longer be necessary, and developers will be able to create more expansive worlds
that are ultimately more enjoyable for gamers. Sony's technology for the PlayStation 5 is going to operate in a fairly similar fashion
with a more direct path between the SSD and the VRAM,
and it also utilizes PCI Express 4.0 for speeds of up to 5 gigabytes per second.
So you should get a better experience no matter which console you pick.
Of course, I know tons of you don't bother with consoles and you game mostly on your PC,
but you don't have to feel left out as Microsoft has announced it's bringing the direct storage paradigm to Windows 10.
To take advantage of it, the game needs to support direct storage individually,
and you have to have a compatible graphics card though.
The good news is that it appears that NVIDIA's new RTX 3000 series GPUs
will work with direct storage. AMD's forthcoming Big Navi is also rumored to support the feature,
so fingers crossed you'll get to enjoy a more seamless experience across platforms.
Unless, of course, you only game on the Nintendo Switch.