 Games are going to look better and play better thanks to this new tech powered by the humble SSD. That might not make any sense. Like for years, we have been saying that storage speed does not matter for gaming, but now that Microsoft's Direct Storage API has finally been released to developers, that changes. It's now possible for your GPU to load data directly from your SSD. And it's only a matter of time before games support it. But why does it matter where your GPU gets its data from? And how is this going to make your games better? And how am I going to load this sponsor segue directly into your brain? Dot Tech. Last year, Dot Tech domains gave away a ton of awesome prizes with their Break the Code puzzle contest. And this year, they're gonna take it to a whole new level. Try and break the code to win today using the link down below. In my opinion, Direct Storage and Sony's equivalent have always been underrated. Because we can't turn it off, we can't do a side by side to see how much of a difference it makes. So it's always been this weird nebulous thing that we can't feel, you know? And now that it's finally on the PC, we can get some real answers. Now we don't have games to test right now, but Microsoft did give us a peek at what it can do. First, there's a simple Hello Direct Storage that's designed to get developers acquainted with the API. But more importantly, there's a Mini Engine Model Viewer. This is intended to show developers the difference Direct Storage can make when loading assets with a real world example. Why don't we have a look for ourselves? This is the Model Viewer. What this lets us do is basically show the difference between Direct Storage and not Direct Storage. So these two commands that I'm cycling between here have the Non-Direct Storage and Direct Storage versions respectively. So let's launch the Non-Direct Storage version first and see how long that takes to load. Okay, not too bad. And then we can look around. It's not a very complicated scene. It's actually quite small for what it is. It's not like the Unreal Engine 5 demo, but it is a whole bunch of assets. They're just loaded in here. We can see that took 0.33 seconds for everything to start up. Now let's go with Direct Storage. Okay, you can see the same thing is happening here. We've got the same overall set of assets. And if we get out 0.08 seconds. I cannot overstate how much of a difference that is. This one little scene, just 52.4 megs uncompressed is loading nearly three times faster. Now true, we're talking fractions of a second here, but expand that out to hundreds of megs, even multiple gigs of assets loaded by modern games. And that's a lot of time saved. But now I have two questions. First, how does it save so much time on the same hardware? And second, how will it scale with those more detailed game environments? In order to understand what's going on here, we have to understand how assets are loaded into video memory. The reality on PC up until today has been that the asset is first read from storage to the CPU, then placed into system memory, your RAM. From there, it's copied through the CPU again to the GPU. Now this sounds like a roundabout process. And as we've seen in our demo, it definitely slows things down. But up until the mid 2000s, this wasn't a major issue because you'd usually load everything you needed all at once. What changed? Streaming assets. As open worlds became larger and as consoles available video memory shrank in comparison to PCs, it became increasingly common to need to use more textures and 3D models than could be held in memory at once. This was foreseen as early as 2001 when Sony filed a patent to seamlessly load game worlds as boundaries are crossed, eliminating the need for loading screens. Fast forward to today and loading screens are seen as an unnecessary inconvenience in an age where seamless asset streaming is the norm. You usually only see the first one and then again when you die or when you fast travel. Ever notice how today's games connect areas with elevators or tunnels or hallways? Yeah, that's why. There have been attempts to help with this over the years. Compression was one of the first such concepts introduced. And in fact, one of the earliest methods is still in use today. Prior to that, you had to either shrink the dimensions or use a color map to reduce the memory footprint of textures and after its introduction and adoption by the industry, it enabled larger, more detailed assets to be loaded more quickly, even if they still had to be copied from the CPU to the GPU. Compression paved the way for graphics to leap out of the crunchy 90s visuals and into brown muddy 2000s visuals. Hey, it was good for the time. It also paved the way for another attempt to improve performance, this time in the same way that direct storage does. By cutting the CPU out as much as possible. Texture atlases effectively rounded up all the little textures a scene would need and then plopped them into one giant texture. The end result being a dramatic reduction in the number of textures that needed to be copied to the GPU and more importantly for the time, the number of draw calls that had to be made. Sounds like a great solution. What do we need direct storage for, am I right? Well, texture atlases have some drawbacks. You can't tile them. Colors will blend together around the edges of each sub-texture in the atlas and perhaps most importantly, swapping one or two individual textures requires swapping out the whole atlas, which is really inefficient since they're so big. The nail in the coffin, texture atlases were becoming a thing around the same time that streaming assets became popular. Talk about bad timing. Direct storage solves all of those problems. It allows the GPU to read directly from storage without any intervention from the CPU. Meaning that an entire copy step is just being removed from the pipeline for each and every asset loaded this way, which as we've seen, leads to a significant reduction in load times. That means that not only can game worlds be larger and more detailed with shorter or even no loading hallways, but you won't need a massive GPU for it either since lower end GPUs with less VRAM will be able to swap assets in and out more efficiently. I can see game engines becoming more aggressive in terms of how they tweak asset streaming according to available VRAM to maximize the effect. And I could see you in a swacket from LTVStore.com. Seriously, it's comfortable for most of the year and doesn't look half bad either. But what about our second question? Will direct storage scale for larger assets? Well, for it to be able to, the GPU first needs to fetch the assets and decompress them. This is a problem. While yes, I said before that GPUs support compressed assets, this is a different type of compression. With games being as massive as they are, assets are typically stuffed into giant compressed archives to save space and for more efficient distribution. Prior to direct storage, the CPU handled all of this and that was fine because it was all going through the CPU anyway. Unfortunately, direct storage in its current form doesn't include a way for the GPU to do that decompression, at least not on PC, but it is possible. Nvidia has something similar to how Sony's dedicated PS5 hardware handles this, which they call RTX I.O. When it's enabled, decompression via custom hardware or via the GPU itself will be significantly faster than it is via the CPU at all, full stop. And as a bonus, it's decompressed straight to video memory. So that performance boost we saw earlier will be amplified because we're skipping two steps instead of just one. But as long as data has to pass through the CPU, direct storage won't be super useful. Microsoft says that fixing this is a priority, so hopefully we'll see it before games go live. The alternative is games that ship with uncompressed assets, which, I mean, with how big Call of Duty has gotten, with compression, I sure hope you got a big SSD. Why is it taking so long though? Microsoft has had direct storage on Xbox for ages now, and we're still getting table scraps on PC. Well, it's easier to implement a brand new API like this on a fixed platform that you can control both the hardware and operating system for, and consoles are usually the platforms with the greatest initial lead. Asset streaming, for example, was, to my recollection anyway, first seriously explored on consoles at a time when the available VRAM compared to contemporary PCs was laughable. Regardless, it was a problem at the end of every generation since then, and even the eight to 10 gigs of memory that the Xbox series is and the PS5 have is going to seem extremely limited in five to 10 years. To stay relevant for longer than the Xbox One and PS4 did, they need tech like direct storage that will offer game developers the flexibility they need to crank up the visual fidelity or create ever more sprawling open worlds we crave. Supporting direct storage on both Windows 10 and 11 is also no easy feat, but Microsoft says that Windows 11 will work better thanks to enhancements to the storage subsystem, something that we're going to have to test in more detail when games get released. Get subscribed so you don't miss that, by the way. And that's really it. It'll be a while yet before we see games coming out with support on PC, but it's getting really close, you guys. And when it does finally drop, it's legit going to change the way that games are made. 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