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Microsoft announced on Monday that it’s finally making its DirectStorage API available to game developers, promising to bring one of the Xbox Series X game console’s best features, Quick Resume, to PC.
Microsoft originally announced that DirectStorage would come to Windows in 2020. Microsoft released a preview of DirectStorage in July 2021 and today said the API would be made available to all developers. However, the company has yet to specify which games will be supported by the new DirectStorage API.
Simply put, DirectStorage drastically speeds up load times on a PC, exploiting the way the GPU interacts with the SSD to dramatically increase data transfers. In Xbox Series X, AMD’s integrated GPU interacts with the SSD, enabling “quick resume”, which essentially saves the state of games that enable it. Instead of loading the app and then the game, Quick Resume simply resumes playing, much like Netflix resumes a show that was previously paused and quit.
To be fair, it’s unclear if the PC experience will be the same, although Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has talked about “instant” loading and the ability to pick up where you left off. Nvidia RTX IO, as Huang called it, connects the GPU’s video RAM to an NVMe SSD, allowing the two to talk directly to each other and quickly load digital game assets. This will do two things, Microsoft said in 2020: eliminate long load times and effectively speed up GPU texture decompression and loading. The latter is most important in open-world games where the game is always accessing new textures as you move through the world.
By releasing the technology as an API, Microsoft made DirectStorage technology available to the entire industry, not just Nvidia. Remember that Nvidia’s RTX technology is built on Microsoft’s own Direct Raytracing API. So while it’s possible that Nvidia’s branded machine will help push Nvidia RTX IO right before your eyes, we should expect AMD to benefit as well. technology too.
Specifically, DirectStorage involves three things: a DirectX12-style invocation model, so applications themselves don’t have to handle I/O requests; GPU decompression of these assets; and a storage stack that takes advantage of DirectStorage features.
What will you need to take advantage of DirectStorage? According to Microsoft, DirectStorage will adapt to older hardware, even older spinning hard drives. Microsoft will also make DirectStorage available for Windows 10. But the technology is also optimized for Windows 11, which “will unlock the full potential of DirectStorage,” according to Microsoft. Fast I/O transfers between a GPU and a storage device will also benefit from fast storage, which means an NVMe SSD is probably best.
Microsoft’s next steps are to distribute the API and then let players know which games will actually support the new DirectStorage technology. Microsoft said it will also continue to work on GPU decompression, a feature that will give developers more control over resources,” the company said.
