Preview of Directstorage now available – even for Windows 10

The upcoming Windows 11 initially looked to be a requirement for users who want to take advantage of Directstorage, but in the preview for developers recently released, Microsoft makes the interface available even under Windows 10 version 1909 and later.

Directstorage is an API that allows graphics cards to communicate directly with NVME devices at speeds that are much closer to the devices’ theoretical maximum performance than can be achieved with existing APIs. The fact that the graphics card itself handles the communication also frees up resources from the system’s processor and system memory.

In addition to direct communication, Directstorage also has support for letting the graphics circuit decompress resources in real time, which in turn further increases the effective bandwidth while the processor avoids the load. In this first preview, however, the decompression function is not included.

According to Microsoft, this is a performance that goes from tens of megabytes per second and hundreds of operations to gigabytes per second and tens of thousands of operations. In addition to faster loading times, it also means that games can flow in resources during the game’s much faster than before.

Larger game worlds, better performance and above all fewer and shorter loading times are on the menu. The technology is already used on Microsoft’s Xbox Series consoles and a similar technology is available on Playstation 5. The clearest example of how it can change the structure of games in terms of streaming in assets is Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart.

Microsoft announces on its blog that while Directstorage works on Windows 10, Windows 11 will provide additional benefits to the technology. This is because Microsoft rebuilt its storage stack in Windows 11, among other things, with Directstorage in mind. The company has not yet announced a date for when the next developer version will support decompression or when the final version will be released.

Are you considering staying on Windows 10 with Directstorage available through both operating systems? Tell in the comment thread