If you've just bought a shiny new gaming PC or an ultra-fast SSD in the Black Friday sales, then you might be wondering just how well it can fling data between the storage and the graphics card.
Well, it turns out that 3DMark has been wondering the same thing because it's just released a new benchmark tool to test DirectStorage performance.
If you're wondering what DirectStorage is, just think of it as a software toolkit that when used in games can help speed up the loading of data, between the storage drive and graphics card's VRAM, as well as reducing the load on the CPU.
Normally, such data transfers are handled in a very linear fashion, resulting in a bottleneck with modern SSDs and CPUs. DirectStorage is an API that provides more control over this, by allocating a large pool of system memory for the incoming data and then using multiple data transfers in parallel.
The most recent version of DirectStorage also includes an option to let the GPU, rather than the CPU, handle any data decompression.