DirectStorage GPU Decompression / RTX IO

Yup, what a pity

 

Intel's Sampler Feedback Streaming tech demo added DirectStorage support. Of course the disclaimer that this an early and limited synthetic test case and to not draw conclusions on what will happen later on with games should apply.



https://compusemble.com/insights/ho...-benefit-of-windows-11s-new-storage-stack-yet

 

Why would it? Nvidia hasn’t backed off from labeling standard Vulkan and DirectX raytracing as “RTX”.

 

They noted that BypassIO isn't enabled in Windows 11 yet, but an insider dev build should support it.

 

Its good to see they are starting to implement directstore, its early days but im sure improvements will follow, aswell as the important GPU acceleration.

 

Yea, I'm on the latest insider dev build and it supports it.



I tested out the SFS demo as well and there's definitely a CPU utilization reduction when using DirectStorage in certain scenarios. I'm still waiting for a better demo to release or be demonstrated that shows off what the tech is actually doing before anything else. I'm not really a fan of that SFS demo.

 

Announcing AMD support for DirectStorage launch - GPUOpen

 

Soooo, I need to say good bye to my gaming sata ssd, and go nvme, right ?

 

DS should work on any drive really. But you'll need NVMe for full benefits, on PCIE 4.0 preferably.

 

Sure, in 5-7 years when devs start using DirectStorage properly.

 

RTX IO works in conjunction with DirectStorage not in lieu of it.

 

Unfortunately seems that way, no one's truly using nvme ssd hardware aside from a few games.

 

We already have games released *today* that take advantage of this DirectStorage-type paradigm.

Any developer that has gotten dev kits from Microsoft or Sony in the past couple years will have had experience with these capabilities, and I'm 100% sure that many proper next gen multiplatform titles will be taking strong advantage of it as well. But we haven't seen that yet, as we're still in the latter days of the cross-gen period. It will not take another 5-7 years to get there and I have no idea why people think this is going to be the case.

If the argument is just that 'a lot of people dont have NVMe SSD's', then that can change very quickly once devs prove upgrading to one will be worth it. It's not like we're talking some expensive proposition here. NVMe SSD's can be had for like $60.

And if the expectation is that PC gamers *wont* upgrade to NVMe SSD's in a big enough number to justify building for DirectStorage anytime soon, then we're gonna have to accept that there's something deathly wrong in the PC gaming market and that it will start to hold back gaming as a whole, as well as become an inferior platform to play cutting edge games on. I personally dont believe this, though. PC gamers *will* upgrade.

 

Are there any reliable statistics on how many pc gamers are left with mechanical harddrives or even SATA SSD's for that matter? With the number of >RTX2060 level gpus sold (more than the consoles even), i wonder how many of those have such powerfull gpu's, the most expensive component, but left themselfs with mechanical harddrives. I personally dont know anyone thats still having a HDD as their primary drive. Its quite common though that users have a nvme/sata ssd as OS/games drive, and a large HDD for storage.

Also going forward, since atleast two years it has been impossible to buy any gaming-oriented laptop or pre-build desktop machine without nvme interface/storage. And if your building yourself, why would anyone go through the hassle of trying to opt out on a SSD and go for a hdd?
That and 'cutting edge' games that play to the strengths of modern hardware will most likely not run on a system thats running HDD's or sata 2 ssd's, since most likely such a system wont be sporting RTX3070 gpus and zen 3 processors, otherwise it was a very un-balanced system build..

 

I hope you’re right but the industry does not have a good record on such things. I’m sure we’ll see benefits like shorter loading times in a few years but fast I/O won’t be a minimum requirement on PC for a long time like it already is for some console games.

 

The last few replies seem to miss the mark in a few ways.

First, about SATA SSD's versus spinning disks: everyone who doesn't understand storage gets hung up on misleading bandwidth claims between the fastest of the spinning disks (250MB/sec for a current-gen 8-platter 16TB Seagate Exos drive for example) versus a SATA SSD (~550MB/sec for a generic drive from ten years ago.) If you truly understand the storage stack and how applications pull data, this bandwidth number is functionally meaningless. Instead, you need to understand details around random read access times if you want to talk about the application start and level load duration. Even the fastest access times of a spinning disk will be around ~5msec, predicated on a physical 15,000 RPM 2.5" drive with 4 msec of rotational latency plus another msec or so in controller and head placement latency. Compare this to even a cheap SATA SSD which will have access latencies in the hundreds of microseconds or less -- a full order of magnitude (in excess of 10x) faster than the spinning competitor.

So yes, even a SATA SSD can be 10x or even faster than the uber-fastest SATA spinning disks where it truly matters for reads, which may still be enough to be impactful for the load times of a properly storage-threaded game. I'll go back to something I've mentioned in this thread (or one of the half-dozen equivalent storage-complainer threads in the forum): the Windows kernel is capable of literally millions of IOPS, which would equate to dozens of gigabytes/sec in throughput, even on a single CPU core. At the commodity levels we're talking about, the limit isn't the kernel or controllers or drivers, it's intelligent application logic. This new DirectStorage opportunity provides a way for the application developers to "simply" leverage known-good APIs for accessing storage, versus writing their own code and apparently sucking at it.

 

I haven't been able to watch it just yet, but MS posted a new video from GDC about optimizing I/O performance with DirectStorage on Windows.

 

Totally not related to DirectStorage, but I got a kick out of seeing an iPad, PS5, and NSW in the video.

[edit] So, a couple things I take from that. Much like Dx12 in general, a developer that isn't using this properly will actually worsen their game's storage I/O performance. Some storage I/O requests are still better serviced by the Win32 storage API. So, if a developer just naively dumps all of their storage I/O requests onto DirectStorage it's likely that I/O performance in their game will be significantly worse.

Also, GPU decompression isn't supported yet and is something they are still working on.

Regards,
SB

 

„There are triple A games on consoles that use direct storage” really ? Like which one?

 

Yea, I'd like to know this too.. I mean, every game that I can think of that loads somewhat impressively quick on Xbox essentially matches what PC version has been doing for ages.. and I attribute that to simply having a faster CPU and an SSD in general, rather than taking advantage of any DirectStorage/Velocity Architecture type improvements.

Hopefully after some real next gen games start pumping out, we'll get postmortems which go into detail about all this stuff.

It's been a really boring gen thus far, unfortunately.