It may have 12 teraflops of graphics power, but one of the Xbox Series X's best features will be its fast SSD storage, which promises to eliminate game load times And this feature will be included in Windows 10 PCs [Microsoft is working to provide Windows 10 developers with DirectStorage APIs, the purpose of which is to provide tools to help games better take advantage of SSD advancements, such as PCIe and NVMe storage, to reduce load times The goal is to

Microsoft's blog post on DirectStorage is full of jargon, but in a nutshell, it is about increasing the in-out (IO) interaction between software and fast SSDs This is what Microsoft did with the Xbox Series X's custom NVMe storage and its Velocity architecture

Microsoft explains that modern games are very good at breaking down complex data and are better at it than older games because of the amount of data they load By breaking up game assets like textures into smaller pieces and loading only what is needed for the currently rendered game scene, modern games use more IO processes than older games, which tended to load game assets in several large chunks

While this current approach is more efficient, it requires many IO processes, which Microsoft says can be a problem on today's PCs [Unfortunately, the current storage API is not optimized for such a large number of IO requests and cannot scale to higher NVMe bandwidths, creating bottlenecks that limit what games can do," Microsoft explained Even with ultra-fast PC hardware and NVMe drives, games using existing APIs cannot fully saturate the IO pipeline, leaving precious bandwidth on the table"

However, DirectStorage plans to solve this by essentially optimizing the flow of data from NVMe storage to the graphics card that provides all game rendering By doing this, we can increase the IO of assets taken from the SSD to the GPU and improve decompression

"Developers will have a very efficient way to send/process many orders of magnitude more IO requests than ever before, ultimately minimizing latency to get into the game and loading as fast as game characters can move, larger, You get a more detailed virtual world," Microsoft explains

In short, if you have a Windows 10 PC with NVMe SSD storage, you could see significantly faster load times when playing games in the future

Nvidia has just announced the GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070, all of which promise increased graphics performance and improved data IO