Microsoft has officially released DirectStorage 1.1, and there are already new drivers from Intel and Nvidia to support this technology.
Microsoft has announced that DirectStorage 1.1 is now officially available to developers, promising to bring faster load times for games on Windows. This is thanks to the newly added support for GPU decompression, which offloads the decompression function of game assets from the CPU.
GPU decompression is a big part of DirectStorage’s promise, though it didn’t show up when the API was first made available to PC game developers earlier this year. Two weeks ago, Microsoft said it would arrive with DirectStorage 1.1 before the end of the year, and thankfully it didn’t take long.
In the past, when you were playing a game, the job of the CPU was to decompress the assets stored on your computer, and then those assets were sent to the GPU so they could be viewed as needed. But, as Microsoft points out, GPUs are great at handling this type of task faster, so dumping that work into the GPU makes sense. Of course, to keep up with this, Microsoft also had to create a new compression format, GDeflate, which was developed in partnership with Nvidia. This format is optimized for GPU decompression, and based on Microsoft tests, assets can be decompressed almost three times faster thanks to this optimization.
While GPU decompression is supported on all GPUs that support DirectX 12 and Shader Model 6.0, there are improvements – called metacommands – that GPU manufacturers can make to their drivers in order to specifically improve performance on their hardware. Intel Corporation And the nvidia They already have improvements for DirectStorage 1.1 and GDeflate in the latest versions of their GPU drivers. says AMD It already has drivers with metacommand support, but it will be shared with ISV partners under a non-disclosure agreement. You can follow the AMD support page to get the latest drivers as they are released.
While DirectStorage is meant to be used in Windows games, Microsoft says it will release the source code for the GDeflate compressor and decompress so that developers can compress assets on other platforms. Now that GPU decompression is officially supported, it should be a matter of time for games to start implementing them, and you should see a huge difference in load times when this happens.
source: Microsoft
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