>one (1) game released in 2024 that supports it
>it's a port of a PS4 game
Why didn't fast load times take off on PC?
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DirectStorage
>one (1) game released in 2024 that supports it
>it's a port of a PS4 game
Why didn't fast load times take off on PC?
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>Why didn't fast load times take off on PC?
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
most of steam userbase is below 12GB of VRAM
if your flowchart is accurate you'd need a lot of VRAM for this tech to work properly
You dont need a lot of vram. Vram is a frickton faster then normal ram
you mean Rift Apart right? That was a PS5 game not ps4
It requires 3GB/s NVMe drives right?
Most people are still on SATA which caps out at 0.5GB/s
Alienating most of your userbase for a new tech isn't a good business strategy.
This. The tech requires nvme, but most people are still on SATA ssd and/or hdd.
For what is worth, SATA ssd is good enough, but it just depends on how well the game is optimized regarding LOD and texture size. DD2 for example as a current year release lets you walk anywhere around the world with 0 loading screens after the initial save load (at the very least on a sata ssd, idk about hdds).
A potential use for direct storage would be not to just eliminate loading screens and/or fake loading screens (slow moving section), but maybe to also eliminate the need for high vram that njewdia cards suffer from because jensen thinks you dont need more than 12gb, lol.
At the end of the day, however, you'll be limited by console tech anyway. If it won't take off on consoles it won't take off on pc, since games nowadays are made for consoles first.
So what you're saying is that pc is holding back gaming?
Its the opposite. While having a well defined architecture allows devs to optimise their games for that hardware, the hardware of the average pc is more powerful than that of a console, primarily because console gpus and cpus are cut-down, but highly efficient dies to reduce heat produced so everything can be fitted in a nice small-ish box that can fit on a desk and wont overheat (most of the times anyway, but this is thermal design territory, and not necessarily the dies fault), but it runs worse because pc architecture =/ console architecture. On pc then you have to brute force better performance either through even better hardware or by lowering visual fedelity. Its the devs fault not optimizing the ports and not taking advantage of pc hardware. The pc market is too small to build games around them first and then port the games to console later, but too big to ignore completely, so we are in this situation.
Its a nice feature for sure, potentially taking a big load off vram and cpu resources as well, but if the game isnt built around it because the devs are lazy, then too bad. Also as stated in
the magic software used by snoy and microshaft is different, they are not interchangable and the game devs that make the games for those platforms might not bother to port the functionality to to pc because they dont want to make the console version look inferior or cant be bothered to port it because they expect pc users to either not have the hardware required and thus wasting resources or to brute force better performance with better hardware anyway.
Its hard to know hoe many people actually use nvmes, since steam hardware survey doesnt inspect what type of hardware storage is used, but its probably safe to say that not many, and if the feature is not implemented in games then people will have no reason to upgrade to nvme and because people wont upgrade, devs wont implement it.
Why not have it in the settings option where it auto detects your storage device and enables/disables the option? Isn't it just like enabling/disabling HDR, DLSS etc?
It's probably something the entire game needs to be built on. Like DirectX.
Changing how the game accesses data vs changing brightness and saturation or resolution is probably more complicated. I'm not a programmer, so I wouldnt know, but its probably that + the fact that its simply not worth the extra dev time to implement it for pc users, because, again, games are made for consoles.
>games are made for consoles.
In 2024?
2014 maybe, some games
2004 yeah for sure
In 2024 no game is made for consoles except Nintendo games.
You can't say that when it's considered a miracle that a game runs without major frick ups on PC nowadays. It's the hard truth that companies focus for consoles first, then port them to PC. It's easier to develope for a single device then move it to an array of devices.
You are aware most people still use consoles for gaming right? The majority would shit and piss themselves if you ask them to do anything at all in windows or any os for that matter. I know people at my university that cant even send emails, to say nothing of solving software issues (IT courses were a nightmare).
And as
says, it is considerably easier to develop for a system with well defined specs.
The ps and xbone have different hardware and architecture between themselves and even more different still from a random user pc. The magic software they use are not interchangable and simply not usable on pc, because of different hardware and because the company would never want to give it to pc to not detract from console pros.
The tech might not even be worth using, because it requires dev time and resources to implement, and sata ssd access isnt that much slower compared to nvme (5-7sec loads for sata ssd vs 1-2sec nvme), so it just isnt worth it. (Forspoken has directsotrage, which is nice, but ultimately quite useless)
To fully make use of directstorage, the game would have to be built around it, but if a studio would do that, it would mean they would have to frick over anyone still on sata ssd or hdd (resulting in loading times during gameplay)
DirectStorage is already becoming the norm. It's dumb not to support it. Even fat linux users can get the functionality. As games get bigger and bigger with procedural loading, being able to quickly load and unload assets is key. You homosexuals wanted nonlinear games. Now your old tech can't load them.
The thing is the PS5's magic SSD uses whatever it's equivalent is, and the Series S/X use DS. There's really no reason not to use it if you need to swap out assets regularly, which is why more games are using it.
Support is increasing. Diablo 4 and others use it.
What does DirectStorage do? The diagram seems to be reading remote data over the internet (via the NIC) into GPU memory? For what purpose?
It's not remote, it's local storage, nvme ssd on PCIe, to be more exact.
So this tech allows your GPU to read disk data into its VRAM, just as a CPU can red disk data into system RAM. The traditional way is that the GPU asks the CPU to read the disk, and then to transfer from RAM to VRAM, which is an obviously slower process that involves CPU cycles as well.
It's not a new concept. DMA was used in the past for audio to be read by sound cards without asking the cpu to transfer the data.
What's with the NIC in the OP pic? It's not a network interface card?
That image seems to be about nvidia RTX IO, not directstorage specifically. So maybe that refers to networked storage.
Another possibility is that NIC might stand for NVME Interface Controller. But that would be strange, since Network Interface Controller/Card is the more common term already.
load times haven't really been a problem on pc for a decade
this is an improvement, but a relatively small one for anyone that already an SSD. It's a big improvement for consoles, but not so big that you can't accomplish all the same things it would allow you to do on even a normal SATA SSD. You still need some sort of "loading" screen to hide the transition where it actually does the operation, whether that takes 0.8s or 0.5s really doesn't matter much. And that's only if you really design games to take advantage of it, unless you're loading and unloading huge amounts of content at once(like Rift Apart's entire gimmick exists to justify this) most games are more than capable of loading everything they need normally.
It won't make any difference when the games are technically such lazy messes anyway.
If it's not Unreal Engine then the devs are using their own proprietary data structrures and archival anyway.
These days they just let tens of thousands of files sit there and they get randomly loaded in.
I dont remember any loading time being above a few seconds for the last couple of years tbh
But I ve riding the m2 train for years
Like:
>960 EVO-980 EVO-990Pro
Portal RTX fully patched.
Because they're fast already?
I'm really sick of tweaks/methods that can't be forced on all games.
My nvme ssd is so fast games load into my 32GB of ram and then into 12GB vram faster than on your toy computer.
Load times are fast enough already, modern kusoge has bigger problems that no one wants to fix
DirectStorage isn't point-to-point NVMe
And to answer your question, it didn't take off because GPUs don't understand filesystems