Blazing Fast NVMEs and Direct Storage API for PCs *spawn*

It's getting ridiculous. Doubling the bandwidth is good but if it's harder and harder to build, what the point. They could have done that years ago.

I guess they can give pci-e 5 to the gpu (first slot), and then still stay in pcie4 for the rest ?
 
It's getting ridiculous. Doubling the bandwidth is good but if it's harder and harder to build, what the point. They could have done that years ago.

I guess they can give pci-e 5 to the gpu (first slot), and then still stay in pcie4 for the rest ?

I would assume that's exactly how it's configured. You have 16x PCIe5 lanes dedicated to the GPU and then another 4x PCI4 lanes dedicated to the first M2 slot. However it may be possible to configure in a different way in the BIOS. Perhaps 8x PCIe5 for the GPU and then 4xPCIe5 for the NVMe. If this kind of messing around is required though then it suggests there won't be any consumer level PCIe5 drives available to take advantage of it.

Then again, even with a fast PCIe4 drive you should be able to fill the VRAM of an RTX 3090 in under 2 seconds so is there really much real world benefit of a drive that's twice as fast?
 
For home users , I don't see the urgent need, even if you can't stop this kind of progression. But, if this is really hard to implement for motherboard manufacturers, I guess only the server market in need of more and more bandwitdh will be interested at first. Even if some proprietary techs are already there to answer some needs.
 
NVMe 2.0 has been released, includes specifications for ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) command set, Simple Copy Command, Endurance Groups, Key-Value command set, and Rotational media.

https://nvmexpress.org/nvme-2-0-specifications-infographic/
https://nvmexpress.org/everything-y...0-specifications-and-new-technical-proposals/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16702/nvme-20-specification-released
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-2-0-supports-hard-disk-drives


that suggests there won't be any consumer level PCIe5 drives available to take advantage of it.
I guess only the server market in need of more and more bandwitdh will be interested at first.
It's not just about the availability of PCIe 5.0 lanes in the host CPU. If you look at Marvell Bravera SC5 specs above, they include no less than 10 (ten) ARM Cortex-R8 and Cortex-M7 cores dedicated to LBA sector processing, and an additional Cortex-M3 core for TCG Opal encryption.

Typical PCIe 4.0 NVMe controllers only have 3 (three) ARM Cortex cores even for high-end products, with the same amount of flash memory channels (8 or 16), and they already require large heatsinks to operate reliably.


Clearly something needs to be done about LBA sector translation and garbage collection/wear levelling overhead before PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds of 16 GByte/s (and PCIe 6.0 x4 at 32 GByte/s) become viable for consumer drives.

Explicit namespace management (ZNS) does help reduce controller overhead, but it's mostly targeted at enterprise storage at the moment...
 
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No pcie5 in sight for amd based on this leak.

AMD-Raphael-AM5-GamesNexus-1-768x432.jpg

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-raphael-zen4-am5-presentation-from-march-2020-leaks-out
 

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NVMe 2.0 has been released, includes specifications for ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) command set, Simple Copy Command, Endurance Groups, Key-Value command set, and Rotational media.

https://nvmexpress.org/nvme-2-0-specifications-infographic/
https://nvmexpress.org/everything-y...0-specifications-and-new-technical-proposals/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16702/nvme-20-specification-released
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-2-0-supports-hard-disk-drives



It's not just about the availability of PCIe 5.0 lanes in the host CPU. If you look at Marvell Bravera SC5 specs above, they include no less than 10 (ten) ARM Cortex-R8 and Cortex-M7 cores dedicated to LBA sector processing, and an additional Cortex-M3 core for TCG Opal encryption.

Typical PCIe 4.0 NVMe controllers only have 3 (three) ARM Cortex cores even for high-end products, with the same amount of flash memory channels (8 or 16), and they already require large heatsinks to operate reliably.


Clearly something needs to be done about LBA sector translation and garbage collection/wear levelling overhead before PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds of 16 GByte/s (and PCIe 6.0 x4 at 32 GByte/s) become viable for consumer drives.

Explicit namespace management (ZNS) does help reduce controller overhead, but it's mostly targeted at enterprise storage at the moment...

I would guess by the time PCI-5 is adopted on motherboards and consumer drive reaching the 16GByte speeds come they will have moved on to newer arm processors

Aside from that for gaming wouldn't it just be easier to put an ssd directly on the graphics card ? Cut out the cpu completely in that regard
 
For gaming maybe but for every other things, no... And you should expose it to the os... Anyone here played with Radeon SSG ?
 
by the time PCI-5 is adopted on motherboards and consumer drive reaching the 16GByte speeds come they will have moved on to newer arm processors
Cortex-M and Cortex-R aren't full-featured processors, but embedded microcontroller cores built for very low power consumption.

wouldn't it just be easier to put an ssd directly on the graphics card ? Cut out the cpu completely in that regard
That would offer no additional incentives over simply using NVMe dedicated PCIe lanes on the CPU, as provided in Ryzen and Rocket Lake. You cannot cut out the CPU because the OS has to perform disk I/O; GPU cannot process cluster chains and decode LBA sectors or issue NVMe commands.

In theory it is possible to use P2P (peer-to-peer) DMA mode of the PCI Express bus to send data from NVMe disk directly to GPU local memory, bypassing system memory, but storage and display driver models would have to be updated to support P2P DMA operations.

Anyone here played with Radeon SSG ?
Radeon SSG software libraries were simply using the SSD RAID disk as a very fast file cache - it wasn't directly accessible from the GPU, as product ads led us to believe.
 
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So DirectStorage is Windows 11 only.

With a high performance NVMe SSD and the proper drivers, Windows 11 can soon load new games faster than ever thanks to a breakthrough technology called DirectStorage, which we also pioneered as part of the Xbox Velocity Architecture featured in the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

With DirectStorage, which will only be available with Windows 11, games can quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU. This means you’ll get to experience incredibly detailed game worlds rendered at lightning speeds, without long load times. “DirectStorage Optimized” Windows 11 PCs are configured with the hardware and drivers needed to enable this amazing experience.

That's going to not sit well with some people I'm sure.

And apparently DirectStorage requires a 1TB NVMe drive...

  • DirectStorage requires 1 TB or greater NVMe SSD to store and run games that uses the "Standard NVM Express Controller" driver and a DirectX 12 Ultimate GPU.
 
So DirectStorage is Windows 11 only.



That's going to not sit well with some people I'm sure.

And apparently DirectStorage requires a 1TB NVMe drive...
darn! I only have a 256GB NVMe and making as most space as I can for my favourite games, living a life of witchery.
 
darn! I only have a 256GB NVMe and making as most space as I can for my favourite games, living a life of witchery.
I wonder why a 1GB drive is required though? The Series S doesn't have a 1TB drive.

Do 1TB drives have a different controller which allows for something necessary that the 500GB and lower drives don't?
 
So DirectStorage is Windows 11 only.
That's going to not sit well with some people I'm sure.
I think that was expected, considering they are revamping the entire I/O Manager stack to support batch I/O requests.

Do 1TB drives have a different controller which allows for something necessary that the 500GB and lower drives don't?
1 TB requirement probably has to do with the size of typical game assets rather than performance.

That said, current 1 TB models typically have significantly better IOPs performance and sequential write speeds, due to additional flash memory channels and bigger DRAM cache; 256 GB variants can be 2-3 times slower, and 512 GB variants can be 1.5-2 times slower.
 
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Yep, Windows 11 and 1 TB NVMe only.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/06/24/windows-11-the-best-windows-ever-for-gaming/
https://wccftech.com/windows-11-will-be-required-to-run-the-new-directstorage-api/

Well, I already have an 1 TB PCIe 3.0 disk; look forward to see the benchmarks to consider an upgrade to a PCIe 4.0 model...

  • DirectStorage requires 1 TB or greater NVMe SSD to store and run games that uses the "Standard NVM Express Controller" driver and a DirectX 12 Ultimate GPU.
The 1TB requirement seems strange. Why place such an arbitrary size constraint on it? It's not as if you won't be able to fit a Windows install plus at least a few games on a smaller drive.

Interesting to see the NVMe requirement confirmed though. So no SATA SDD support. It's good for devs I suppose as it means they can guarantee at least similar to XSX performance from their DirectStorage path in games.
 
Maybe they will automatically re-partition the disk to include a separate gaming-only partition, as we discussed earlier? I still think that would be too much hassle for most users...

Anyway, for those with UEFI capable PCs who still use MBR system disks, you will need to convert your disk to UEFI/GPT partition layout even if you're still using HDD or SATA SSD, because CSM has to be disabled to enable TPM 2.0 and UEFI Secure Boot. This will also make the inevitable transition to a bootable NVMe system disk much easier. :mrgreen:
 
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I was planning to upgrade my gaming ssd sata => nvme (pcie 3 but it's ok) when direct storage will be release, with a 2tb drive, so i'm fine with it in the end.
 
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