The Redmond giant 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, the game that will be the first to use this technology on the PC, coming out in January 2023.
Until now we thought SCORN would be the first game which would arrive on PCs with Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 support, but unfortunately it won’t. Those responsible for its development, Ebb Software, confirmed only a few days ago that they will not eventually use this technology in the PC version, although curiously it will be available in the version of that game for the Xbox Series S and Series X.
If you’re wondering why the arrival of Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 on PC is so important, don’t worry, we leave you with no doubts. It is important because this technology completely frees the CPU from the task of decompressing the resources a game uses when it has to load, it transfers that work to the GPU. This is, by its very nature, much more efficient and faster in completing that taskand thus achieves a significant performance improvement which greatly reduces loading times.
In a technical demo that Microsoft itself did recently, you can see that the loading time without Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 was 2.36 secondsand the maximum CPU utilization rate achieved 100%. With this technology the charging time was barely 0.8 seconds, and the CPU load peaked at 15.08%. The difference is noticeable, not only in loading times, but also in the weight the processor has to support.
I remind you that Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 is about to reach both Windows 10 and Windows 11, although according to the Redmond giant the version for the latter operating system has further optimizations which are not available in the Windows 10 version, so it should offer better performance.
As for the GPU 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 flawlessly with Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1. This means that a modest GeForce GTX 970, or a Radeon RX 470, would already be compatible with this technology, as both support Shader Model 6.4.
