It turns out that in both recording times and maximum FPS, there is no significant difference between the latest Phison E26 PCIe 5.0 controllers and those using PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 when using the DirectStorage 1.1 API. This was demonstrated by the Forspoken benchmark, the first game to support Microsoft DirectStorage.
The latest PCIe 5 SSDs to hit the market this year will feature the new Phison E26 chip. And since they won’t be popular, it’s not out of place to think about whether it even makes sense to think about the purchase of brand new SSDs. Not quite, according to tests conducted by YouTube channel Compusemble.
Behind everything is Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1, a technology that, among other things, can reduce recording times by up to 40%. This API works on the principle of a set of compression and decompression algorithms entering the communication between the SSD and the GPU, allowing more data to be transferred than under normal circumstances. This process is also less CPU intensive when processing requests from NVMe, allowing for faster and more efficient transfer of data from storage to the graphics subsystem.
At the same time, it is not just Microsoft’s marketing rhetoric, DirectStorage in practice increases transfer speeds really significantly. Even in the case of SATA SSDs. The question therefore arises as to whether this effect becomes even more pronounced if DirectStorage is applied in a comparison test of SSDs for different generations of the PCI Express interface. And it turned out that in the case of PCIe 5.0 drives, not even the Microsoft panacea can do much here.
Square Enix’s Forspoken may not be a good game, but it’s the first to support DirectStorage, so it was used for the test. Because of this, the recording times are already reduced enough that even if you combine the recording times from seven different levels/scenes in the built-in benchmark, it makes the difference between an advanced SSD controller with a Phison E26 for PCIe Gen5 x4 and a two-year-old Adata XPG SX8200 Pro for PCIe Gen3 x4 barely perceptible three seconds.
In numbers, this means that a PCIe Gen3 SSD is 32% slower than a PCIe Gen5 SSD, but in reality you won’t even notice the difference. Not to mention the effect on FPS. At the same time, the throughput of unprocessed data with PCIe 5.0 x4 is roughly 4x higher than with the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. It means that DirectStorage not only works, but that it even blurs the difference between SSDs for different generations of PCI Express interfaces.
Let’s add that choosing the latest PCIe interface is a logical and correct choice for building a new PC. In addition, there is only one game on the market that can use DirectStorage. In any case, let’s hope for the widest possible implementation of this technology in newly released games.
