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 two gigabytes 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 i o 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 i o 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 i o 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 CPU you won't have as much overhead two
it more efficiently parallelizes i o 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 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 own the game on the nintendo switch
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