One of the best Xbox Series X features has arrived for PC gamers
Microsoft’s DirectStorage tech that speeds up SSD loading times (and more besides) has already been seen on the Xbox, but has now officially arrived for PC gamers.
In a blog post, Microsoft announced the launch of the public SDK (software development kit), and that from today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage. However, note that developers will of course have to build this technology into their respective games – so don’t expect that to happen for some time yet for the majority of devs.
DirectStorage allows “developers to more fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices”, specifically NVMe SSDs and making the most of the huge bandwidth available with those drives, in terms of not just getting faster load times, but making an open world game run more smoothly.
The caveats are that DirectStorage requires the right hardware for the best results – an NVMe drive (and contemporary GPU) – and the game must be coded to support the tech. Furthermore, Microsoft recommends Windows 11 for optimal results with DirectStorage as it sports the “latest storage optimizations built-in and is our recommended path for gaming”.
Remember that Windows 10 will work with DirectStorage, because it’s still fully compatible; but Windows 11 is set to further enhance the tech. In a similar vein, you may see some performance benefits from the tech with drives other than an NVMe SSD (including hard disks), but DirectStorage is really designed around NVMe.
The techie side of how all this works is pretty convoluted – see this second Microsoft blog post for more details if you’re up for them – but the basic gist is that DirectStorage changes the way I/O (input/output) operations work to better facilitate the huge bandwidth NVMe offers, while
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