The Redmond giant has confirmed that Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 will arrive on PC later this year. We don’t have a specific date, but from what we know it probably won’t be available until the month of decemberjust in time for the debut of Forsaken, a game that will be the first to use such technology on PC, to be released in January 2023.
Until now we thought that SCORN was going to be the first game that it would come to PCs with Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 support, but unfortunately it won’t. Those responsible for its development, Ebb Software, confirmed just a few days ago that in the end they will not use this technology in the PC version, although curiously it will be available in the version of said game for Xbox Series S and Series X.
If you’re wondering why the arrival of Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 on the PC is so important, don’t worry, we’re not going to leave you with any doubts. It is important because this technology completely frees the CPU from the tasks of decompressing the resources that a game uses when it has to load, it transfers said work to the GPU. This is, by its very nature, much more efficient and faster in completing that taskand thereby achieves a significant performance improvement that greatly reduces load times.
In a technical demo that Microsoft itself recently did, you can see that the load time without Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 was 2.36 secondsand the maximum CPU usage rate reached 100%. With this technology the charging time was barely 0.8 seconds, and the CPU load recorded a maximum spike of 15.08%. The difference is notable, not only in loading times, but also in the weight that the processor must support.
I remind you that Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 is going to reach both Windows 10 and Windows 11, although according to the Redmond giant the version for this last operating system has additional optimizations which are not available in the version for Windows 10, so it should offer better performance.
As for the GPU that we will need to be able to use this technology, I can confirm that, in general, any DirectX 12 compatible graphics card that supports Shader Model 6.0 it will work without problems with Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1. This means that a modest GeForce GTX 970, or a Radeon RX 470, would already be compatible with said technology, since both support Shader Model 6.4.
