Forspoken will be the first PC game to take advantage of the SSD with the DirectStorage API

Forspoken will become the first PC game to take advantage of the almost forgotten Microsoft API DirectStorage (formerly known as Xbox Velocity Architecture), and it is necessary to remember that it is the rival technology of the “magic SSD” of PlayStation 5 that the company designed for both the Xbox Series X|S consoles and for PC.

If you want a brief summary, everything translates into really taking advantage of SSDs to do things as normal as eliminate load times. In addition to said technology, the game will also have access to all the advantages linked to AMD FidelityFX technology.

In essence, this API was originally designed with next-gen consoles in mind (that is why they are the only ones to take advantage of it), and its usefulness is that of reduce CPU utilization when it comes to gaming-related NVMe requests, thus saving expensive CPU cycles for other tasks. Instead of handling a multitude of individual NVMe requests for each asset that needs a GPU, the API sends large compressed batches of I/O requests in parallel that are decompressed by a GPU that supports the DirectX 12 API, which boils down to a little operating system intervention and low CPU utilization, so free up resources for more important taskslike running the game itself.

By using DirectStorage instead of traditional methods of sending assets, such as textures, first to the CPU and then to the GPU, game developers can not only reduce load times, but also improve graphic quality and use the leftover CPU cycles to add more advanced physics or deal with the game’s Artificial Intelligence. DirectStorage aims to solve a problem that exists today on PCs, which is seeing an Intel Alder Lake with up to 16 cores offering high load times with an NVMe SSD compared to a less powerful console.

The only requirement will be a GPU that supports the DirectX 12 API y an NVMe PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 SSDremembering that although Microsoft wanted this technology to be exclusive to Windows 11, finally it will also come to Windows 10 due to the unpopularity of its new OS.

via: Tom’s Hardware