How DirectStorage 1.1 could make Windows 11 an essential upgrade for PC gamers

techradar.com:

Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.1, a feature which uses the GPU to speed loading times, has just been tested with comparisons drawn between AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics cards – with some very interesting results. In short, the feature looks set to seriously supercharge loading times with NVMe SSDs.

As Tom’s Hardware(opens in new tab) reports, Compusemble(opens in new tab) developed a benchmark test that German tech site PC Games Hardware(opens in new tab) (PCGH) used to produce results for AMD’s RX 7900 XT pitted against Intel’s Arc A770 and also Nvidia’s RTX 4080.

All GPUs were tested in a PC with Intel’s Core i9-12900K (Alder Lake flagship CPU) under Windows 11.

First off, a quick reminder on the tech to refresh your memory if needed: DirectStorage 1.1 comes with GPU decompression tech, so the GPU can handle decompression (of compressed game assets), and do so with far greater speed and efficiency than the CPU.

This ushers in faster loading times, and quicker loading of assets on-the-fly in big open world games, meaning a smoother experience when wandering about those kinds of large environments.

In testing, PCGH found that Intel’s A770 GPU was actually the top performer in terms of achieving speedy decompression of game assets, hitting 16.8GB/s compared to 15.3GB/s for the RTX 4080, and 14.6GB/s for AMD’s 7900 XT (for PCIe 4.0 testing – though Intel also led for PCI 3.0, albeit by a slightly narrower margin).

While that was a somewhat eye-opening victory for Intel Arc, it’s important to note that it didn’t translate to any real difference in loading times between the GPUs, with all of them ensuring blazing-fast speeds.

PCGH witnessed 5 second load times being reduced to 0.5 seconds – essentially the blink of an eye – in all