The new version of the most used operating system in the world is not popular among video game fans, however, from Redmond they have a very clear plan to force the transition to all fans to play on the PC. How will Microsoft force the update to Windows 11 for games? We explain it to you.
The pandemic has caused many development studios to have to cut back on the application of certain technologies in games, causing us to find ourselves in an intergenerational period as far as the use of technologies is concerned. If there is a hardware technology that will completely define the games of the future, it is not the most powerful graphics cards, nor the processor, but the new storage units and the use they will make of them.
Why will Windows 11 force itself through games?
One of the DirectX 12 Ultimate features that will be fully supported in Windows 11 is DirectStorage. It is an API that allows you to control communication between the SSD and the graphics card without the involvement of the processor. Which will be key to directly move the so-called graphic assets such as models, textures and other direct visual information to the graphics VRAM without increasing latency in accessing it.
It is often said that drives this solid are only to reduce the load of games, however, they have a very clear application and this is the reason why video game studios have put a lot of pressure for their inclusion in PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series. Obviously, the PC is not going to be left behind.
Unreal Engine 5 is the key
However, one of the most important elements that make DirectStorage is what Epic Games has called Nanite in his Unreal Engine 5. The idea of Nanite is simple, so far when generating a very large scenario you have to make sure that all the information of the current section is in the VRAM, as this is limited, the developers have to make transition scenes to load the games from the hard drive.
Under the new paradigm, developers can focus on what the player sees and build the scene as they walk by. Taking only the necessary parts of the scene from the SSD at high speed. For example, in a speed game the circuit would not be fully rendered, just a part beyond what the player can see, but extremely detailed. The rest would not need to be rendered, since it would not be visible. In addition, this allows to show a greater level of detail at short distances.
There is also a relationship with Ray Tracing
Ray tracing uses data structures about the ordered scene in order to work. That is precisely what Nanite is in Unreal Engine 5 and you will have already understood that it depends on DirectStorage. Hence, Windows 11 in games will be essential. At the moment, these data structures function as a black box that only AMD, Intel or NVIDIA know about, but we will soon see how they use the scene information generated via Nanite to also speed up Ray Tracing.
Of course, current graphics cards are not designed for this, but there is a clear trend in this regard and there are functions in this case that are surprisingly found on consoles, but not on PC. So we are talking about a highly anticipated feature that we will see in future graphics cards, possibly in revisions of the RTX 40 and RX 7000. In any case, the bottom line is that Microsoft has tied this innovation to all games in Windows 11, in order to tie users to their operating system.
