Forspoken dev says one-second game loads are now a tentative reality on PC

theverge.com:

Last Monday, Microsoft declared that DirectStorage would usher in “a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games.” And while that now seems a little too grandiose, the developer of upcoming tech showcase game Forspoken now claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach.

Speaking at a GDC 2022 presentation about the tech embedded in the PC version of the game, Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono says that the Square Enix title will actually load some scenes in one second flat, provided your Windows 11 PC has a NVMe SSD capable of over 5,000MB/sec reads.

That one-second load time is not the case for every scene, and he didn’t actually show us any scenes load in that amount of time — instead, we saw cutscene and gameplay examples where Forspoken took 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds, and 2.2 seconds to get us there, thanks to the way DirectStorage offloads the streaming of graphical assets from the CPU to the GPU.

You might be wondering if that’s substantially faster than games run without DirectStorage, and Ono admits the answer is actually no, not yet: while you’ll definitely see a huge speed boost from an SSD over the magnetic spinning platters of a hard drive, and from an NVMe SSD over a slower SATA-based drive, the current implementation of DirectStorage in Forspoken is only removing one of the big I/O bottlenecks — others exist on the CPU.

And if you’ve been hoping that DirectStorage will bring enhanced performance with regular spinning hard drives, the answer is not yet: “HDDs are not delivering the anticipated result due to hardware performance limitations,” says Ono.

But, says Ono, “I/O is no longer a bottleneck for loading times” — the data transfer speeds of DirectStorage are