Microsoft DirectStorage 1.2 Now Available: Could Make Load Times On HDDs Faster, New Features & Bug Fixes

wccftech.com:

Microsoft DirectStorage 1.2 is now available and comes with several new features plus a list of fixes that developers can utilize.

Although the Microsoft DirectStorage API has been out for a while and is supported by all major GPU and SSD vendors, there are not a whole lot of applications that utilize it at the moment. The only major gaming title to feature support for it was Forspoken which was released a few months ago and although the game showed some great loading times, the title itself wasn't met negative reviews on the PC platform which meant that a vast majority of gamers and PC audience have yet to see the API in action.

The DirectStorage 1.2 has the potential to make HDD load times even better once it is deployed in future games and applications thanks to the Force Buffered IO mode.

Force Buffered IO

DirectStorage currently opens files in unbuffered mode. This allows us to avoid unnecessary copies, getting the data onto the GPU as quickly as possible. However, we heard from some developers that they’d like to be able to use the same code both on high-speed SSDs as well as legacy hard drives. The legacy hard drives require buffered IO in order to mask the long seek times. For this reason, we added the ability to configure DirectStorage to open files in buffered mode.

This can be enabled by setting the “ForceFileBuffering” field in DSTORAGE_CONFIGURATION1 to TRUE. Note that buffered IO is incompatible with BypassIO, and therefore DisableBypassIO must be set to TRUE when using this option.

It is the title’s responsibility to know when to use this setting. This feature should only be enabled for slower HDD drives that will benefit from the OS file buffering features.  

New GetCompressionSupport API 

DirectStorage