Is your CPU struggling when gaming? Microsoft DirectStorage could come to the rescue
Microsoft’s DirectStorage tech has had its first outing on PC courtesy of Forspoken, and according to some new testing, the feature boosts not just loading times considerably (for those with the right hardware), but also in-game frame rates in certain scenarios.
Neowin(opens in new tab) flagged up a YouTube video(opens in new tab) in which Compusemble tested Forspoken, observing that: “DirectStorage has a pretty significant effect on frame rate, frame time consistency, and GPU utilization at 1080p, whereas it has virtually no effect at higher resolutions.”
What seems to be happening here, Compusemble elaborates, is that DirectStorage only kicks in like this to bolster frame rates when the game is CPU-limited, meaning the processor is struggling with its workload, whereas the graphics card is ticking along just fine.
That’s the case when playing Forspoken at 1080p (Full HD resolution) for Compusemble, but when the resolution is cranked up to 1440p, the YouTuber becomes GPU-limited instead – and the frame rate boost vanishes into thin air.
The testing was performed with a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G SSD (2TB) in a gaming PC with an RTX 3080 Ti graphics card plus Ryzen 7 7700X CPU. Remember, to get the full benefit of DirectStorage you need an NVMe SSD, and furthermore running Windows 11 gives better results than Windows 10 (the test PC used Windows 11).
We knew that DirectStorage would do more than just speed up loading times, and that it’d make a difference in big open world environments, supercharging the in-game loading of assets on-the-fly. But this is the first tantalizing evidence that the tech really can boost frame rates on PC – at least in certain scenarios, namely where the GPU isn’t breaking a sweat, but the CPU is
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