The State of Microsoft DirectStorage

The promise of Microsoft DirectStorage is appealing: unlock the underlying power of the latest NVMe SSDs and say goodbye to lengthy level loading times. Whole worlds being streamed on the fly and assets being pulled seamlessly to ensure your immersion isn’t broken is something plenty of gamers can get behind. This isn’t simply a technology that’s needed for current games either—as we move to more and more detailed models and textures, games will need to pull those into gaming environments without popping up a loading screen. It’s no small ask, but gamers want rich worlds populated by high polygon-count models and using ultra-high resolution textures. All without incurring the wrath of length loading times.

This is exactly what the Microsoft DirectStorage dream is all about—underpinning game development of the future.

To understand what DirectStorage can achieve, it’s worth covering how games currently work (don’t worry, we’re talking in the simplest sense here.) Right now the assets for your games are pulled from your storage by the CPU, where they are decompressed into memory before being passed to your graphics card. Fundamentally, DirectStorage removes the CPU from this asset loading path – pulling the model and texture data directly from your NVMe SSD to your graphics card. With DirectStorage 1.2 the GPU can then decompress the assets locally, making for a much smoother and more efficient path. That’s the dream scenario anyway.

The reality hasn’t quite lived up to this ideal.

The problem for Microsoft DirectStorage is very few games support it. This is compounded by the fact that games say they will support DirectStorage, but they don't launch with support, and still haven't implemented support month's later. The following list is taken from this link to DirectStorage SteamDB Info which checks for any games that include files from the DirectStorage SDK. This doesn't necessarily mean that the game implements DirectStorage.

Anyways, on to the list of games that support DirectStorage:

The likes of New World, Synced, Diablo IV, and EA Sports FC 24 show that the developers have looked at DirectStorage and include the SDK in their games, but they may not have fully implemented support at this point. Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown hasn't been released yet, so it's unclear whether it will launch with DirectStorage support, although driving games do feel like a good fit for the technology.

At the time of writing, three years after DirectStorage was originally unveiled, four games have shipped with DirectStorage support: Forspoken, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, and Forza Motorsport. Hardly the game-changing wave many had hoped for. More games are on the way and some existing titles have promised patches after launch to add support (Diablo IV), but it’s still slim pickings out there.

Forspoken may not have wowed on release, with a lackluster metascore of 63%, but it is impressive when it comes to its loading times, taking just 1–2 seconds for plenty of levels.

Extensive testing reveals that such loading times are achievable on a whole range of different SSD generations, with the underlying throughput having little impact on loading times. The fastest PCIe Gen5 SSDs, such as the CORSAIR MP700 PRO, barely shows any difference when compared to a relatively sluggish SATA SSD.

Forspoken’s environments can feel very empty as well—as if the loading times have been reduced at the cost of the world you explore. Put another way, Forspoken may support DirectStorage, but it isn’t pushing the underlying hardware in the slightest.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is more appealing visually, and has a much healthier metascore of 85%, but it isn’t without its issues. Indeed at launch it was found that the game performed better and loaded quicker if the local DirectStorage files were deleted from the game’s folder.

Multiple patches from the developers, and a hotfix from Nvidia, have helped here, but it’s still not the great example that was needed for the underlying technology. It also highlighted one of the concerns of DirectStorage for a graphically rich game: does using the GPU to handle asset loading and decoding work if the same GPU is burdened with ray tracing, DLSS, and all manner of other visually intensive tasks?

Of course supporting DirectStorage isn’t a small task. It represents a fundamental shift in how games are developed, how assets are handled, and potentially how the game is played. Factor in the development time for larger games stretching to several years, if not decades from the initial designs, and we could be in the for long haul here. Even so, with the latest consoles from Microsoft and Sony supporting similar technologies, the gaming industry as a whole should be embracing this way of handling assets.

The potential of DirectStorage is still incredible and still something worth getting excited about. It may be the only way the games of tomorrow can handle all the rich models and textures gamers demand. It’s also the key concept that really unlocks the potential of the fastest NVMe SSD drives. It looks like we're all going to have to wait a little longer for the DirectStorage killer app.