DirectStorage is Microsoft’s API designed to significantly speed up game asset loading by directly transferring data from NVMe SSDs to the GPU, bypassing the typical CPU-heavy bottlenecks associated with decompressing assets. The idea is to change how games load textures, assets, and worlds, making them appear faster and potentially reducing load times drastically.

However, you might find yourself wondering whether those performance improvements actually matter. After all, we always hear about technological advancements that don't actually really speed things up in the real world. In the case of DirectStorage, it's a little bit different.

Where DirectStorage helps the most

Fast loading from storage

There are a few key pillars that DirectStorage helps improve performance, but they're a little bit harder to spot than most performance-related improvements. The first game to use the technology on PC was Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, though its implementation on Nvidia GPUs was said to be poor. As a result, we'll be writing this section about its benefits assuming that its implementation is done correctly.

For starters, DirectStorage can significantly improve loading speeds, as assets are streamed and can optionally be decompressed from storage straight to the GPU, bypassing the CPU in its entirety. This can also enable smoother gameplay as a result, especially in games that may have fast travel options or teleporting. Skipping the CPU also means fewer overheads when it comes to processing, freeing it up to do other tasks.

Finally, it can reduce texture pop-in as it will load textures faster. This can significantly benefit open-world games with a lot of objects that need to be rendered, as it will speed up their streaming from storage to GPU.

Where DirectStorage matters the least

Growing pains

DirectStorage isn't a fix-all for all of your performance problems, and in fact, the performance benefits might be negligible. In the case of Ratchet & Clank, its implementation on Nvidia GPUs actually hampered performance, which led developer Nixxes to skip out on adding GPU decompression DirectStorage in Horizon Forbidden West. The recently released Spider-Man 2 uses GPU decompression, so it's a bit of a gamble as to whether developers will include it or not.

To be clear, Spider-Man 2 was plagued with issues at launch, which many theorized related to the introduction of GPU decompression. However, those with weaker CPUs experienced significantly worse performance when disabling DirectStorage in that game, which shows that it certainly does help, and that it is worth using, though with some growing pains at the moment.

DirectStorage is also optimized specifically for NVMe SSDs, meaning that you won't realistically see any major benefits when running games off of SATA SSDs or even HDDs. Admittedly, I don't think there are many people playing games that are tens of gigabytes in size on an HDD, but regardless, it's still worth noting.

This same caveat goes for games that don't use high-resolution assets, except you won't experience any downsides. It's just that those games also won't benefit from DirectStorage if the files that are being read from storage are small in size, as it isn't particularly taxing on your CPU to load those files and decompress them on the fly while you play.

Should you care about DirectStorage?

Yes, but maybe not right now

Right now, DirectStorage is at a weird point where it's not quite there yet, but it clearly has benefits in the right conditions. DirectStorage has been used on Xbox consoles over the last few years, which is significantly easier to implement thanks to the homogeneity of the hardware. PCs are a whole different beast, and it's clear that there will be growing pains and teething issues, but the actual concept behind the technology is sound.

It's a shame that developers aren't quite putting in the time to make sure it runs perfectly, but in the future, it's very likely going to become a very important tool for developers. With games reaching incredible sizes and assets being distributed in higher and higher resolutions, it's a lot of work for the CPU to keep up with reading those files, decompressing them, and then streaming them to your GPU. Eventually, it starts to hold the CPU back, which we've seen with Spider-Man 2 so far.

There's a list of games that have listed DirectStorage support on Steam that you can check out, and some of the titles are surprising. Admittedly, some of them don't seem to properly implement it, but plenty of others do. The list will continue to grow over the next few years, though, and the potential benefits are immense when it's implemented right.