Computer

Your SSD will cause you to have to change your graphics card

One of the broken promises of the current generation of games is the use of the SSD, because a certain company with four letters wants to stretch the gum of its previous toy, we have to settle for titles that are not designed to use a type of drive which is becoming more common on PCs to play. However, much of the blame for this lies with NVIDIA and AMD, for not implementing certain technology beforehand.

PlayStation and Xbox bring specialized hardware

One way to protect games against piracy is by encrypting the information and one way to do it, which is also extremely useful, is by compressing the games with some algorithm for it and making use of a fixed function unit in the hardware that is take over this task. Which is something that has been on consoles since the generation of PS4 and Xbox One, but especially the need comes from the fact that the storage in which the games are sold, the Blu-Ray, has not increased in size when it already we have games that occupy several disks.

In any case, it is necessary to install the game on the disk. Thus, in the middle of the installation, the code of the copy of the game, that of the console itself and that of the user are taken into account to create a license to use and encrypt the game again on the hard disk or SSD of the console and it will stay that way. All this is due to the fact that to reduce costs, both SONY and Microsoft bought hard drives on a large scale that, due to specifications, were unfeasible to sell on PCs.

With the new generation of consoles it is different, the games have continued to increase in size, but the storage has not grown. Think the original PS4 was and has been sold for years with a 512 GB HDD, who wants one like that for PC? Instead, PS5 has come out with an SSD drive that has 50% more storage, making it necessary to use data compression systems.

DirectStorage

On the other hand, the PC lacks the same

Now, if we are talking about SSD drives with a PCI Express interface, that is when an additional problem appears, the bandwidth is such that the blocks of data that arrive in RAM from the drive must be decompressed as quickly as possible in memory. solid state. All this has to be done at high speed to avoid creating a containment. The example in console? Make use of a specialized unit, but this has its crumb:

  • Despite the fact that the chips are from AMD, the piece of hardware in charge of it differs from Xbox to PlayStation.
  • On PC it could not be applied, because this would mean that AMD, NVIDIA and Intel would have to agree on their implementation of DirectStorage.
  • While the CPU could handle the task, at least two full cores will be needed for it.

Let’s not forget that the great advantage of DirectStorage is none other than that it frees the CPU from decompression work and loads it to the graphics card on PC. How to solve it? Well, there’s only one way.

DirectStorage New Way

The SSD will be a burden on your graphics card

There’s a huge gap between what current graphics cards offer in terms of raw power and what games really need. Leaving aside the poor optimization of various titles for computers, what is clear is that the vast majority of users have systems with a 512 GB or 1 TB SSD in their computer, so it is necessary to find a solution to the problem. .

At the moment the only game that uses DirectStorage is Forspoken, which is a fiasco and a single title doesn’t justify hardware changes. So all current hardware, even though it’s DirectX 12 Ultimate, lacks that specialized piece of hardware for data decompression on the solid-state drive. Which means that the SSD is a burden on the graphics card, since it will have to sacrifice traditional cores to perform this task.

As games using this feature come out on the PC gaming market, we will see new models from NVIDIA and AMD that will include such a unit, which will free up the rest of the GPU and they can sell it as more powerful. Do not be surprised to see a review of the RTX 40 and RX 7000 just for this small premise, it may seem small, however, it really is not.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *