W10 and W11 - Direct Storage and Motor Racing Games

[CRMS]

Will Direct Storage improve motor racing game play??

I have a PCS gaming PC built in May 2020.
The MB is the ROG STRIX X570-I GAMING with AMD Ryzen 7 3800X and 11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 Ti.
It currently has a 1TB SSD, specs from the order sheet "SATA 6 Gb (520MB/R, 470MB/W)".

Seems that the MB can take NVMe SSD and manual seems to have 2 sockets - 1 M2_1 on top and M2_2 on bottom. NVMe can hit 10x SSD transfer speeds.
But I don't know if F1 2021, and any other racing game, can make use of the higher transfer speeds and there be worth the change??

 

[barlew]

Will Direct Storage improve motor racing game play??

I have a PCS gaming PC built in May 2020.
The MB is the ROG STRIX X570-I GAMING with AMD Ryzen 7 3800X and 11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 Ti.
It currently has a 1TB SSD, specs from the order sheet "SATA 6 Gb (520MB/R, 470MB/W)".

Seems that the MB can take NVMe SSD and manual seems to have 2 sockets - 1 M2_1 on top and M2_2 on bottom. NVMe can hit 10x SSD transfer speeds.
But I don't know if F1 2021, and any other racing game, can make use of the higher transfer speeds and there be worth the change??

So direct storage will not be available in windows 10 it is only being brought to 11.

Microsoft only released the API for direct storage this week so currently no games use it (as far as I am aware).
Looking to the future Direct Storage support is basically going to be dependant on whether or not developers build it into their games or retrospectively add it via updates.

In terms of hardware DS is compatible with PCIE 3.0 NVMe drives and PCIe 4.0 drives. So in the future I believe you should be sorted as long as you are using m.2 NVMe.

You need to make sure you have enough PCIe lanes to utilise the m.2 slots though.

DirectStorage won't be supported in Windows 10

Microsoft says DirectStorage will be an exclusive feature that "will only be available with Windows 11."

www.pcgamer.com

Microsoft introduces its DirectStorage API which promises to reinvent game storage

Bigger, better and faster.

www.pcgamer.com

Microsoft DirectStorage will work with PCIe 3.0 SSDs

You'll get a better experience with a PCIe 4.0 drive though.

www.pcgamer.com

*EDIT* - Disregards, I didn't realise Microsoft had done a u-turn on W10 support.

 

[Scott]

I have my reservations about there being any performance impact to the game itself.... the claims are there to say it will due to the reduced CPU impact..... but this remains to be seen.

It should make a huge difference to load times/cut scenes/etc. It should open up a few other possibilities (proper interactive cut-scenes etc).

It's going to be beneficial IMO, as long as it's widely adopted and utilised.

My biggest fear is that devs get lazy with their storage optimisation and the game sizes get larger as they don't need to worry about load times!

 

[SpyderTracks]

Yeah, o think it's mainly for load times. Have a look at ratchett and clamp on the PS5 for examples of the benefits with loading times between levels.