Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com October 14 news, Microsoft announced in the official blog platform, DirectStorage API is about to usher in the 1.1 version update, bringing GPU decompression of game resources, loading speed tripled.

Last year, Microsoft Windows 11 was released with a blockbuster technology called DirectStorage API. This new API changes the way games read data from NVMe SSD drives, resulting in faster reads and shorter load times, which are subsequently devolved to Windows 10.

In addition, Microsoft is also making efforts to develop GPU decompression related technologies for DirectStorage. Specifically, the game requires a lot of data to build an immersive world, and each character, object, and landscape has "assets" that describe features such as shape, light, and color, which add up to hundreds of GB. In order to reduce the overall package size of the game, these assets are compressed before the game is opened.

When the game is running, the assets are transferred to system memory, and after CPU unzips the data, the data is copied to GPU memory for use as needed. The transmission and decompression of these assets on game devices greatly increases load time and limits the details that can be contained in an open world scenario.

DirectStorage 1.0 improves the data transfer part of this process, while DirectStorage 1.1 is designed to speed up the decompression part.

Generally speaking, the decompression is done on CPU, because the compression format has traditionally been optimized only for CPU. Microsoft provides an alternative method in DirectStorage 1.1 to transfer the decompression of these assets to GPU, called "GPU decompression." Graphics cards are very efficient at performing repeatable tasks in parallel, so you can take advantage of this feature and the bandwidth of high-speed NVMe drives to do more work at a time, resulting in less time to load assets, faster game loading and open world map loading.

CTOnews.com learned that Microsoft has built a highly optimized example. As you can see from the following figure, when DirectStorage runs GPU decompression instead of CPU decompression, the scene loads nearly twice as fast, and CPU is almost completely released for use in other game processes. We can look forward to the improvement in game loading performance after the release of DirectStorage 1.1.

Microsoft says the technology can be used on Windows 11 and Windows 10 (Windows 11 performs better), players need to put the game in NVMe SSD, and graphics cards need to support DirectX 12 and Shader Model 6.0. preferably cards that support DirectX 12 Ultimate.

Both Nvidia and AMD will release drivers that support DirectStorage, and in terms of games, there is no game that supports DirectStorage, so this technology can be said to be a "war for the future" solution.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.