Windows 10 Will Support Game-Boosting DirectStorage Tech After All

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/d...tm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow

A recent Microsoft blog post has corrected the company's earlier statement that DirectStorage, a tech that boosts storage performance to improve gaming, would only be available in Windows 11. Now Microsoft has clarified that DirectStorage will indeed support both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

DirectStorage is a new storage acceleration API, currently used in Xbox Series consoles, that improves game loading times by allowing game data to be transferred directly from an NVMe SSD to the GPU, thus bypassing the CPU.

To further speed up performance, DirectStorage also includes a new GPU decompression technology that supports higher decompression I/O rates and bandwidth than CPUs. That also makes the GPU a better option to decompress game assets.

The only caveat with Windows 10's implementation of DirectStorage will be its older storage stacks -- a set of drivers that allows applications and Windows to communicate with storage devices. This will lead to reduced system performance, compared to Windows 11, but is still better than having no DirectStorage technology at all.

Windows 11 will be equipped with an upgraded storage stack, allowing DirectStorage to operate at its full capacity.

It's great to see Microsoft reducing its system requirements for DirectStorage, allowing far more people to grab the technology and use it on Windows 10 and older hardware.
 
Probably no reason why it can't work on 10 or even 7 with minimal if any performance loss. CP2077 showed that DX12 was perfectly possible with only minor feature/performance issues on 7 albeit the baked in DX12 support is quite buggy and has performance issues in some areas - but I suspect most of that could be fixed with a bit of work.
 
This made me wonder if I should get a nvme SSD, but I stuck with sata 6gbps, as its easy to setup and can be relied upon.

I wonder if the slower read access times (or lower read throughput?) prevent sata SSDs from being used for 'DirectStorage' in Win10 /11? Or, is the requirement for NVME drives just an arbitrary hardware requirement?

I guess the important thing to be aware of here, is that SATA 3 (6gbps) is only capable of "4.8Gbits per second for the actual data", due to encoding. That's 600 MB/s. Makes you wonder if there will ever be a SATA IV, or if SATA will eventually be replaced with NVME drives?

The Series X NVME SSD can handle ~2400 MB/s, so it has about 4 times the read speed of a SATA 3 SSD.

Read speeds of NVME drives can be upto 7000 MB/s (real throughput seems much lower than this) on the fastest NVME drives, link here:
https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/09...nvme-ssd-with-write-speeds-of-up-to-5000mb-s/
 
Last edited:
g67575 said:
I wonder if the slower read access times (or lower read throughput?) prevent sata SSDs from being used for 'DirectStorage' in Win10 /11? Or, is the requirement for NVME drives just an arbitrary hardware requirement?
Click to expand...

Nothing to do with access time or throughput, but purely to do with the driver stack which is far more optimised (in terms of latency, and reduced overheads) for NVME (whereas SATA has lots of legacy baggage, as was an evolution of ATA/IDE designed for hard drives)


g67575 said:
Makes you wonder if there will ever be a SATA IV, or if SATA will eventually be replaced with NVME drives?
Click to expand...

There will likely be a SATA4, as there will still be a need for Hard drives for some time to come in the same way that SAS (SAS4 - "24G", and SAS5 - 45G/bit) has continued to evolve in the enterprise.
 
Last edited:
g67575 said:
I compared the read speeds (random compressed data) of the Samsung 850 Pro (Sata) SSD with the 980 Pro (NVME) on Guru3D reviews, results here:

850 Pro:
https://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct...dmin=0a8fcaad6b03da6a6895d1ada2e171002a287bc1

980 Pro:
https://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=63794

So, the NVME drive can handle upto ~10 times the read speed of my current drive (850 Pro).
Click to expand...

As already mentioned it's nothing to do with read speeds, but everything to do with the Driver used:

SATA (AHCI) has a single command queue, can only do 32 commands in that queue, uses lots of CPU cycles, has more latency, and is limited in number of IOPS

WfWEzdS.png


https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/en/community/articledetail/articleid/48543
 
This is really good news. Everything I've seen of Windows 11 makes me wince and I was not looking forward to having to upgrade. I maintain that DirectStorage will be a huge game changer for PC gaming. With PCI-E 4.0 the 4x PCI speeds are upped to nearly 8GB/sec and there's already SSDs with sequential read speeds of about 7.5GB/sec. Not only does that mean extremely fast asset swapping to the GPU but the GPU decompressing of textures takes a lot of pressure off the CPU and the system RAM. This should radically improve loading times in games, as they tend to be CPU limited in almost all cases.

DirectStorage wouldn't really be much benefit to older SATA drives since the bandwidth of SATA is so tiny to begin with, the bandwidth for SATA is like 10% that of NVMe drives. None of that really has anything to do with Win11 though, Win11 will have a new driver model which will allow for more efficient hardware access but I don't think that'll be terribly significant.
 
g67575 said:
This made me wonder if I should get a nvme SSD, but I stuck with sata 6gbps, as its easy to setup and can be relied upon.

I wonder if the slower read access times (or lower read throughput?) prevent sata SSDs from being used for 'DirectStorage' in Win10 /11? Or, is the requirement for NVME drives just an arbitrary hardware requirement?

I guess the important thing to be aware of here, is that SATA 3 (6gbps) is only capable of "4.8Gbits per second for the actual data", due to encoding. That's 600 MB/s. Makes you wonder if there will ever be a SATA IV, or if SATA will eventually be replaced with NVME drives?

The Series X NVME SSD can handle ~2400 MB/s, so it has about 4 times the read speed of a SATA 3 SSD.

Read speeds of NVME drives can be upto 7000 MB/s (real throughput seems much lower than this) on the fastest NVME drives, link here:
https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/09...nvme-ssd-with-write-speeds-of-up-to-5000mb-s/
Click to expand...
don't get it, i'd say, by the time this technology used by actual developers, i bet these slow nvme ssds will be much, much more cheaper and the more speedy ones will reach to the price of cheap nvmes today
 
What you have to be careful of though is some people get confused. M.2 drives can be SATA or PCIe Nvme yet look almost identical bar the interface. So some people may think they have NVMe drives but its actually a slower SATA drive in the M.2 slot. Roll on the confusion.
 
Bravo MS you fragmented it by making it faster on Windows 11. Therefore devs are going to use windows 10 as the baseline speed. Nice one.

I guess we atleast get something.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom