Many people mistakenly believe that the advantages of using an SSD as game storage become apparent by connecting the drive to our PC. The reality is different and it is necessary that the game is designed and programmed for it. Unfortunately, on Windows, the libraries needed for this are only compatible with Windows 11 and have not been released yet. Well, the date is getting closer and we can finally get an idea of how each brand of graphics card performs in DirectStorage 1.1.
One of the things that demoralizes us the most from here is to see the current situation of solid-state drives for games. The reason? The number of salon experts who do not stop repeating the mantra that they do not contribute anything. Which is false, and much of the blame lies with the fact that certain console brands continue to treat their previous generation hard drive-based system like a first-class citizen. This leads to the advantages of SSDs in games not being seen.
Why is a necessary advancement in games?
In the PC we find a large number of different memories throughout the circuitry. So copy mechanisms are necessary to copy information from one memory to another. These little processors are called DMA, and their job is simply to copy a block of data. For example, from RAM to VRAM and vice versa. On the other hand, since the NAND Flash in SSDs is non-volatile RAM and except for the fact that it holds data it works like all on-chip memory.
The clearest case of memory transfer is when within the memory hierarchy what we do is copy the data from one level to another, as is the case at hand, from the SSD to RAM. Well, the great advantage of SSDs is that their bandwidth allows us to dump data into RAM very quickly. In games this means that the level design does not have to adapt to the limitations of the hard drive to give the system time to load the next scenario.
However, the limitation is that without DirectStorage we have to copy such participating information to the CPU. Making it lose performance when processing the information in the process. The concept behind DirectStorage 1.1 is simple, allowing the DMA drive inside the graphics chip to access the contents of the solid-state drive without any involvement from the CPU.
What hardware performs best with DirectStorage 1.1?
Well, the ability to copy data between two memories and decompress them in real time is one of the heaviest tasks that exist in terms of performance. To the point that if we do it through a conventional program executed on the CPU we can see a significant slowdown in our system. That is why one of the requirements of DirectX 12 Ultimate is to give that capacity to a small specialized processor inside the GPU of the graphics card.
| Hardware | SATA SSD | PCIe 3.0 SSD | PCIe 4.0 SSD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i9-12900K | 1.47 GB/s | 5.2GB/s | 5.2GB/s |
| AMD RX 7900 XTX | 1.47 GB/s | 12.6GB/s | 14.6GB/s |
| NVIDIA RTX 4080 | 1.47 GB/s | 12.7GB/s | 15.3GB/s |
| Intel ARC A770 | 1.64GB/s | 13.9 GB/s | 16.8GB/s |
Well, when it comes to the ability to decompress data in DirectStorage 1.1, surprisingly the Intel ARC A770 is the fastest of the three graphics cards when it comes to doing this job , the other two being the AMD RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 408 0 from NVIDIA. Although all of them almost triple the performance of a Core i9-12900K set to perform this task with all its strength, that is, with all possible cores and at Boost or Turbo speed, that is, with the CPU gasping for lack of air. .
Precisely the reason why the massive use of SSDs has not been implemented on PC is due to the fact that copying data at such speeds would increase the requirements of the games a lot. Therefore, it was necessary that once and for all the API be available that would allow the use of this capacity in the graphics cards. Now they just need to take advantage of it in games.
