Game loading speed is faster, Microsoft DirectStorage API performance measurement

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Wu Yanzu in South China for the delivery of clues! CTOnews.com January 13, Microsoft said that the deployment of DirectStorage API,Xbox and PlayStation 5 game consoles can reduce game loading time. German science and technology media PC Games Hardware measured DirectStorage API and found that the optimization of NVMe SSD is more obvious than SATA SSD.

PC Games Hardware runs Microsoft's publicly available DirectStorage demo loaded by Avocado on SATA SSD, PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe.

In the process of measurement, the performances of AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, Intel Arc A770 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards are also compared. The CPU tested is 5.2GHz Intel i9-12900K.

The following table shows the transfer rate (in GB / s) for each hardware configuration and shows the average results of five tests. CTOnews.com shows that NVMe SSD runs several times faster than SATA SSD, and PCIe 4.0 has a slight advantage over PCIe 3.0. Surprisingly, although the A770 is inferior in game performance, it is better than RX 7900 XT and 4080 in terms of GPU decompression.

The screenshot in the demo shows the difference between CPU and GPU decompression. The data show that the number of CPU loads the game content of GB takes between one and a half seconds to five seconds, and the CPU usage is between 30% and 100%. While GPU unzips the same game content and loads it in about half a second, and the CPU utilization rate is less than 5%.

CTOnews.com small class, Microsoft launched DirectStorage API for Windows PC in 2020, which is based on Xbox's Velocity architecture, which aims to maximize game performance and throughput, and optimize modern storage interfaces (such as PCIe Gen4/5 and NVMe). You can visit here for more information.