Check out your gaming PC's storage chops with 3DMark's new DirectStorage benchmark

pcgamer.com:

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.

The new benchmark in 3DMark is a so-called feature test, so it doesn't produce a final score. Instead, you get estimates of how many gigabytes per second a given data transfer has achieved. The test runs in three stages: Without DirectStorage, then with it enabled, and finally with the use of GPU decompression (aka GDeflate).

In the images below, you can see a sample test run produced by UL Benchmarks, the makers of 3DMark, and a run I've just done on my main PC. I took the screen capture before the final result was posted, as I wasn't sure how long that display would hang around once finished (not very long, as it turned out).

Note how much data per second is able to be transferred from the system RAM to the graphics card's VRAM when using DirectStorage. Also, note how big the effective bandwidth is when using GDeflate.

At this point, you're probably thinking 'Why doesn't every game use DirectStorage?' and it's a very good question. Some do, of course, such as Horizon