Microsoft's DirectStorage 1.1 Arrives To Boost PC Game Load Times With GPU Decompression (theverge.com) 36
Microsoft is releasing DirectStorage 1.1 this week, and the biggest new addition is GPU decompression for Windows PC games. The Verge reports: GPU decompression works by offloading the work needed to decompress assets in games to the graphics card instead of the CPU. Right now, game assets are typically compressed when they are packaged up for distribution and then decompressed once a game is played. The problem is most compression techniques are designed for CPUs, which aren't great for modern games that want to push for faster decompression rates with the latest PC hardware.
We've seen the industry move to PCIe Gen3 or Gen4 NVMe storage devices in recent years, offering 7GB/s of data bandwidth. This fast storage is great news for game developers wanting to speed up load times, and the advances in I/O technology can dramatically speed up load times and games using DirectStorage 1.1. Developers will now need to tweak their games to make use of DirectStorage 1.1, and the improvements could even see big changes inside games where you move from one world to another or teleport between different parts of a map or world. Microsoft claims this can be as much as three times faster, freeing up the CPU to handle other game processes. [...] All we need now is game support.
We've seen the industry move to PCIe Gen3 or Gen4 NVMe storage devices in recent years, offering 7GB/s of data bandwidth. This fast storage is great news for game developers wanting to speed up load times, and the advances in I/O technology can dramatically speed up load times and games using DirectStorage 1.1. Developers will now need to tweak their games to make use of DirectStorage 1.1, and the improvements could even see big changes inside games where you move from one world to another or teleport between different parts of a map or world. Microsoft claims this can be as much as three times faster, freeing up the CPU to handle other game processes. [...] All we need now is game support.
yep nerds don't understand this.... (Score:1)
"GPU decompression works by offloading the work needed to decompress assets in games to the graphics card instead of the CPU"
yep nerds don't understand this....
Re:yep nerds don't understand this.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost as if it was written for a different site.
Nice. (Score:2)
Lets hope this technology makes its way throughout all of gaming and it doesn't cause more problems than it solves.
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You know how this will go.
RTX 4090 only, win11 only, 12th gen Intel (only) and above.
Everyone else can go pound sand.
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RTX 4090 only, win11 only, 12th gen Intel (only) and above.
Windows 11 only. It's about the only thing you got right, but is it a surprise that they aren't backporting newer APIs to a platform which has been put on a lifecycle notice?
GPU requirements are Nvidia RTX 2000 or later or AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards or later.
CPU requirements are anything which can run Windows 11 by default.
Now don't you have a fake moon landing to go complain about?
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Most game stream load data on the fly. Burning GPU resources to decompress it will make the framerate stutter or drop, assuming it uses resources from the rendering pipeline.
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I'm sure GPUs have multitasking/scheduling by now and can run this at a lower priority.
What it will save the most is memory bandwidth, since you only have to transfer the compressed version to the faster GPU RAM. That memory copy of the decompressed version from system RAM to GPU RAM isn't without resource waste either.
It doesn't sound like it's intended for streaming in data as you're moving through a single space, though. Loading a new area entirely or at game startup are where it would be most useful.
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I'm sure GPUs have multitasking/scheduling by now and can run this at a lower priority.
Some GPU company marketing department is now trying to convince motherboard manufacturers that every laptop and desktop sold as a "gaming" system is gonna need two GPUs. One for disk control, one for graphics. Mark my words. It's coming.
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Really it's beyond time for general purpose CPUs to implement some of these instructions on a few dedicated mini cores. Seems like the framework is there. If GPUs are more useful for general computing than a CPU in so many ways, then it's not a GPU feature.
Re:Nice. (Score:4, Insightful)
Most game stream load data on the fly.
On behalf of the games industry thankyou for saying so. Our tricks work so well. We are really thankful that you like our long hallways, forced animated cutscenes, scenes where you crawl through gaps, stand in elevators, and our convoluted map design which ensures that you can't see around corners.
I mean we don't want to do that and many of our gamers think these tricks we use because of how limited we are with streaming speed break up the flow of the game and get a bit tedious, but it's good to see we have at least one happy customer.
Now if only we can do something about the rest of the customers, or those situations where we just allow the game to briefly stutter or accept pop-in graphics, then we'd be really happy. Oh wait, that's what DirectStorage and Sony's equivalent is for.
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That's quite sad. You've declared a technology garbage without attempting to implement it and seem to not understand why your own industry is calling for this specifically to enhance performance and reduce stutter. Do you work for EA by any chance?
Sorry about the quip, but the reality is game streaming is way too slow. If you've been in the industry you've almost certainly implemented a work around for it or had it limit you in some way, or you've not developed any AAA titles.
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The trick to smooth dynamic streaming is mostly in the offline tools. Everything needs to be in the exact in-memory format in the right order so there's no wasted processing time while loading.
I did some contracting work for EA about a decade ago, fixing some design flaws in their animation system. They offered me a full-time position, I declined and worked in the semiconductor industry for a while.
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You should call up Microsoft and tell them that. They'll probably hire you on the spot for millions for such brilliant insight.
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Making more games Windows/XBOX only ...no thanks
This is Microsoft bigging up another gaming technology that could be implemented by the game or game engine, but they want in the OS
what about SSD on GPU? it's not all X16 is maxed o (Score:2)
what about SSD on GPU? it's not all X16 is maxed out all the time?
Please explain ... (Score:3)
Right now, game assets are typically compressed when they are packaged up for distribution and then decompressed once a game is played.
Every time the game is played? Or only when installed or updated? The latter is how I interpret 'distribution'.
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Usually each time the is loaded, though it's also possible to decompress during installation. Decompressing onto disk makes game installs bigger. Decompressing during level load gives the CPU something to do. Compressed assets on disk mean less to load on slower IO devices.
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They are decompressed in real time, as needed. As such, it's a light & quick compression.
Sometimes games are distributed more compressed, but then they need more than double the disk space briefly.
As I understand it, a modern game is about half a GB of code and 4GB of compressed textures taking up your memory. I didn't realise they weren't decompressed by the GPU as I believe many of the textures are cached in the video memory.
I'm a gamer, not a programmer. I'd like to hear professionals' perspectives
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Sometimes games are distributed more compressed, but then they need more than double the disk space briefly
Umm, it's late. Whilst I've seen installers this bad, normally it's just the largest file which is duplicated.
This creates a practical limit on file size.
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Game assets are quite massive. Loading screens are the periods where the essential parts of the visible level are decompressed and loaded into RAM/GPU memory so you can play. But there's only so much you can do in advance, only so long your customer wants to stare at a loading screen, and only so many minimum requirements you can meet (don't assume every gamer has 64GB of RAM).
The result is twofold: worse compression algorithms to speed up loading time (if you've seen the piracy world there are several prom
Who needs a CPU nowadays? (Score:2)
Next thing you know, PC's will only have a GPU because who needs the CPU if anything can be done on the GPU?
Saves up some space on the motherboard as well.
I Do Not Trust Microsoft to Use My GPU 4 Anything (Score:2)
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If you are running a game under Windows, MS is already in control of your dGPU.
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It isn't necessarily about faster file access. It's about faster real-time texture decompression. NTFS isn't the bottleneck.
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No, it's about faster loading. Basically the bane of any game is the loading screen where you sit there waiting for the game to do something. Most of the time what it's doing is copying assets from the hard drive to the GPU, usually involving a step where the hard drive copies data to RAM, the CPU then decompresses the assets from RAM into the GPU RAM.
The first time you run a game ther
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Speeding the decompression step in that workload will not reduce the number or volume of reads from storage.
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