When can we expect to see Microsoft DirectStorage in real games?

Not sure if this would be the correct category for this subject, but for me, stuttering/hitching in games is more or less the greatest evil in gaming and it's seemingly become more common not less especially in shoddy PC ports, open world games, and UE3 and UE4 titles.

Asset streaming seems to be a common culprit for causing bouts of hitching and my hope is that DirectStorage bypassing the need for the CPU to manually copy data between bespoke memory pools and hopefully being much faster will go some way towards resolving this issue.

Trouble is, we've been hearing about DS for quite sometime and it's still not out as far as I'm aware, even in Windows 11. As far as I know games have to implement DirectStorage at the API level (correct me if I'm wrong) so I'm also kinda worried on that front that it won't even be widely used, at least not for a long time.

Beyond that it's not clear to me what GPU generations will be supported -- will RTX 2000 / Super cards be supported or just 3000 onlwards (etc)?

Anyhow, just wanted to inquire on the board and see if anyone knows more on this front than I do. Thanks,

 

MS is too busy with Windows UI, round corners, transparencies, removing features, etc. And let's not forget the bugs with every other update.

 

Doubt.

You can think of DS as a D3D12 for I/O operations.
If some developer can't make everything load without blocking the render thread now, with "D3D11" storage I/O, it is highly likely that it will be even worse with "D3D12" DS option.

 

Feelsbadman

 

The whole "round corners" thing doesn't appeal to me because:
1) straight lines always look better to me (such a square/rectangle) as there's no aliasing -- no matter your resolution, straight lines like this look pristine. Circles look aliased and the rounded corners of the boxes definitely look aliased when I look closely on my 1440p monitor.
2) My screen is NOT a phone screen with rounded edges (like modern iPhones) -- it's a rectangle with straight lines. Therefore straight line boxes will fit perfectly while circle ones won't.

The fact that there's no way to turn off the rounded edges is really what grinds my gears -- Win11, why can't I change the size of the taskbar without tons of hassle? Why can't I turn off the rounded edges? Honestly what is Microsoft even doing these days, every step forward in their UI they take a step back somewhere else. Like, why do I now have to do an extra click to get to "more options" when right clicking files on the desktop, etc.

 

If only....About time this specific issue get's addressed tbh.
Honestly hoping it eventually starts being rolled out for most games like dlss.

 

That'd be awesome -- I'm not planning to upgrade my GPU for awhile in this market so here's hoping RTX 2000 is supported.

 

Ive been patiently waiting for direct storage.
Big part of why I went PCIE 4.0 everything.

 

DS doesn't need PCIE 4.0, it will work with 3.0 also.

 

I'm surprised they have it working on Xbox so quickly, yet it's taking them so long to really put it out for Windows, although I believe it was finished enough for devs to start using in game development... So give it another year or two before it's in a current PC game.

 

You can shrink the title to "When can we expect to see real games?"

 

"Real games" are dead. We now have payment platforms disguised as games.

 

Not surprising really if you consider the differences between a fixed h/w Xbox platform with a UMA system design and a PC with all of it possible configurations permutations.
Xbox also have dedicated decompression h/w which is absent on PC making DS on PC likely completely different to that which is used on Xbox in everything but the API frontend.

 

Hmm. Didn't nVidia claim something along the lines of RTX GPUs having some kind of hardware decompression capabilities? Or will this be simply handled by the CUDA cores?

 

Yes, RTX IO.

 

Will PC ever adopt dedicated streaming/decompression hardware like consoles? For example, is that something that future CPUs or GPUs would have built into their designs? Seems like the issue of asset streaming stutter has been something that PC ports have really struggled with as of late.

 

Ah, awesome -- glad to hear that's being worked on.

 

Last i hear DS or what it called only works with nvme drives, I dont see what it cant be done with sata ssd drives too, sure i/o differences are there but still it could help those of use still using sata ssd cause nvme are even more ridiculously then sata ssd drives.

Nioh and Nioh 2 are silky smoothg on ps4 and in compatablitly mode on external hdd keeping 60fps with almost no stutter.

But pc port have stutters thare not there on consoles, well atlest nioh does i have not played nioh2 pc yet cause I have yet to install it, like so many other games

 

Maybe. PCs don't really need it.

Assets streaming stutter is a result of a badly written engine, not an API issue.

 

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-io-gpu-accelerated-storage-technology/

Sadly, ss long as MS keeps slacking off with Direct Storage, RTX IO is inconsequential.