6/10/2023 0 Comments Forspoken platformI've also had to do an entirely separate benchmark graph to show the performance difference for the SSDs because the super-slow hard drive makes it impossible to parse the data visually. one minute, for another five frames per second on average? Nah, I'm good. It took an age to copy across using Steam's library transfer and (thanks to our lightning office connection) it was quicker just to delete it from the drive and re-download it than copy it across to one of the SSDs again. Using the HDD for testing alone was a royal pain in the posterior. one minute, in exchange for another five frames per second on average? Nah, I'm good. Still, I'm not willing to trade the extra five or ten fps that I was seeing on the hard drive for sometimes waiting almost a minute for a new scene. Honestly, I couldn't see any difference from a general inspection of the benchmark as it ran through the scenes from the 7,200RPM HDD I used, but it might well have been loading in lower-resolution textures and that's going to be easier and quicker for a modern GPU to render. I had wondered whether the earlier 10% deltas reported were down to using a third-party tool which also benchmarked the frame rate of the blank loading screens, and indeed PCGH, one of the main sources for the statements about diminished performance, have confirmed that's what happened (opens in new tab). On this Zen 4 platform with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900, with an array of different drives and an RTX 4070 Ti (opens in new tab) and an RTX 4090 as the GPUs, I've not seen any level of frame rate difference between SSD types that would have me at all concerned. From my testing experience that will give you the best mix of rapid level loading-around 1 - 2 seconds in the benchmark scenes-as well as high average frame rates. The end result? Well, something that should surprise no-one is your best bet is to use a PCIe 4.0 SSD. Storage: Corsair MP600 Pro XT 2TB | SK Hynix P31 1TB | Samsung 850 Pro 1TB | WD Black P40 500GB | Hitachi 7,200RPM 500GB GPUs: Nvidia RTX 4090 FE | Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti The test runs through seven different scenes, giving load times and frame rate metrics throughout. Still, I've used the game's built-in benchmark to run the engine through different drives, doing three distinct runs, to try and get a clear picture of what's happening. Now, Forspoken's directstorage.dll notes that it is the 1.1 version, but I'm not 100% sure whether the game is actually using the necessary GDeflate compression format that is meant to make it all run smoothly. The latest version, DirectStorage 1.1 (opens in new tab), has added GPU-based decompression to the list of features, which means that instead of needing the CPU to do all the work, game assets are transferred directly to the GPU itself for decompression. This is attributed to the advancements made in the file IO stack on Windows 11, and the improvements on that platform in general." When fully integrated with your title, DirectStorage with an NVMe SSD on Windows 11 reduces the CPU overhead in a game by 20 to 40%. "It handles smaller reads really efficiently, and you can batch things together to get more work done. "DirectStorage is designed for modern gaming systems," says senior engineer at Microsoft, Cooper Partin (opens in new tab). The idea is that with DirectStorage all that happens simultaneously. DirectStorage is designed to streamline the process of taking that compressed game data off a drive and then rendering it. Part of DirectStorage is about using the speed of the SSD memory and the interface it's built on to reduce the CPU overhead that occurs when shifting game data around system memory, decompressing it, and then sticking it into the GPU's frame buffer. Limited because hard drives were still a thing in some gaming PCs and all consoles. Up to now we've still been somewhat limited to the lowest common denominator: the slow hard drive.Īs much as we've had new PCIe drives and the introduction of the NVMe protocol, which massively changed how responsive an OS installed on it was and also how fast games could load, there were still limiting factors at play. Why should you care about DirectStorage?īut first, what is DirectStorage and why should you be interested in the first place? Basically, now that the two main consoles are both using solid state drive technology, there's an appetite for actually using the performance of SSDs to their fullest. Anyways, I've tested a bunch of drives, from the best PCIe 4.0 SSD, down to SATA and external SSDs, then all the way down to a wee 2.5-inch 7,200RPM hard drive I found at the back of the PC Gamer kit cupboard with some of Alan's old 'files' on them.
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