Microsoft says its DirectStorage API will reduce CPU usage by up to 40%

Microsoft expanded the information regarding its API DirectStoragesuch as revealing that the use of this technology will not only eliminate loading times in games as it happens on console, but that it can be released up to 40% CPU usage that can be dedicated to improving other aspects of the games, such as physics or Artificial Intelligence.

In the worst case, this improvement will be 20%, which is not bad at all. Of course, the company guarantees these improvements by naming the Windows 11 operating system together with an NVMe SSD, although Windows 10 will also be supported. As far as the SSD is concerned, it can be both PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0.

The DirectStorage runtime offers game developers the ability to reduce that CPU usage, as well as the load times of their titles. This technology will work well with NVMe SSDs in combination with streaming architectures.

Now reducing CPU overhead. This is a key benefit that I really want to highlight, and you’re going to hear me say it several times in this talk. The more CPU cycles freed up for a title, they can be put to good use in other parts of that title, improving background rendering. AI workloads or anything, additional experiences for example.

Let’s talk about the CPU throttling I was referring to. DirectStorage is designed for modern gaming systems. It handles smaller reads really efficiently, and you can batch things together to get more work done. When fully integrated with the title, DirectStorage with an NVMe SSD in Windows 11 reduces CPU overhead in a game by 20 to 40 percent. This is attributed to advancements made to the file I/O stack in Windows 11 and improvements to that platform in general.

Our first version of DirectStorage introduces CPU decompression, and that’s what you’re using right now, but we’re not going to stop there. We’re going to continue to free up many more CPU cycles by finding more creative ways to offload decompression to other parts of the system.

For example, the GPU. In the future version you will be able to use DirectStorage to uncompress assets using that GPU and this is more CPU saving for you where you can do more extra work on your title.