Thanks to DirectStorage, Forspoken loads in only one second

pcgamer.com:

GDC is an important event in the PC gaming calendar. Apart from giving developers a chance to show off what they've been working on, it also represents a great time to highlight the technologies that are going to power the games of tomorrow. One of the games that is going to tap into plenty of new technologies is Forspoken from Luminous Productions, and it's going to be one of the first games to advantage of Microsoft's DirectStorage. 

DirectStorage aims to significantly improve loading times in games. If you haven't been obsessing over NVMe SSDs, then you may have missed the buzz around the technology: a high-speed I/O API that is comparable with Windows 10 and Windows 11, only it's been specifically optimized for Windows 11 as well. 

The M.2 SSD took just 2.2 seconds to load the first scene using DirectStorage.

DirectStorage is particularly effective at managing small files, and with it, Forspoken aims to reduce its load time from an average of around 10 seconds down to a single second on an NVMe SSD. You're still looking at roughly 10 seconds on a SATA SSD for the game, and over 30 seconds when loading from a hard drive, but a single second on a next-gen NVMe SSD would make for an appealing reason to upgrade to the latest tech.

Luminous Productions suggests that DirectStorage is targeting NVMe M.2 SSDs offering throughputs of 5,000MB/s and greater, which means that plenty of first-gen PCIe 4.0 SSDs are capable of delivering the performance needed. The very latest PCIe 4.0 drives are capable of hitting 7,000MB/s, so it'll be interesting to see if the very best SSDs offer a performance boost, or whether other factors mean that it won't make much difference. We'll have to see when the game actually launches.

DirectStorag