directstorage Which games support DirectStorage?

[Sawtaytoes]

Which games support or will support DirectStorage?

 

I'm looking to test out my NVMe drives against my SATA ones, and I'd like to see if there's a known list of games that support it.

 

I went to PCGamingWiki and didn't see any list. I know a bunch of Xbox games support it, so I figured Windows games should start receiving support as soon as Windows 11 came out, but I haven't seen anything on it since it came out.

[Chris Pratt]

As far as I'm aware, there are no games. Last I heard, the first expected to use it are coming in 2023.

 

You have to realize game development takes years, and something like DirectStorage is fundamental enough that a game needs to be designed around it. If a developer started right when DirectStorage SDK was finally released (March 22, 2022), even 2023 would be an extremely optimistic time to start seeing games using it.

[venomtail]

39 minutes ago, Sawtaytoes said:

Which games support or will support DirectStorage?

 

I'm looking to test out my NVMe drives against my SATA ones, and I'd like to see if there's a known list of games that support it.

 

I went to PCGamingWiki and didn't see any list. I know a bunch of Xbox games support it, so I figured Windows games should start receiving support as soon as Windows 11 came out, but I haven't seen anything on it since it came out.

Games take years to develop and they usually only use the technology that existed when the started development. I'd say most games take 3 years to be completed, so if dev tools were released in 2022, expect the first proper games built around direct storage to release around 2025. Outside of some test demos, all games now are still structured around instance based levels just using modern SSD speeds to nearly eliminate loading screens but they still follow the old principles.

 

Direct storage in a way won't even see its full potential for even more years than some graphical party trick because this legit can fundamentally change how games are designed. There is no habit yet to how to do this best, just some theories as to how direct storage can improve everything. Loading things from storage to RAM have been the lowest common denominator for like the last 40 years.

[Eigenvektor]

Agree with everything others have said. It'll be some time before you see DirectStorage make its way into games and/or game engines.

 

While most games can benefit from faster loading times, that's not something that's going to make or break a game. So I don't think developers are rushing to add it just for that alone.

 

The biggest benefit will most likely be to open world games that can use it to stream in much higher detail objects at runtime. However you'll still need a powerful enough system to actually render those higher detail assets. To actually benefit from that, an engine will need to be designed in a way that can take advantage of loading (and unloading) assets much more quickly than before to achieve overall higher detail levels.

[Chris Pratt]

2 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Agree with everything others have said. It'll be some time before you see DirectStorage make its way into games and/or game engines.

 

While most games can benefit from faster loading times, that's not something that's going to make or break a game. So I don't think developers are rushing to add it just for that alone.

 

The biggest benefit will most likely be to open world games that can use it to stream in much higher detail objects at runtime. However you'll still need a powerful enough system to actually render those higher detail assets. To actually benefit from that, an engine will need to be designed in a way that can take advantage of loading (and unloading) assets much more quickly than before to achieve overall higher detail levels.

This brings up some good points. A lot of gamers are still using SATA SSDs or even HDDs for game drives. I don't know if something like storage medium is captured on things like the Steam hardware survey, but I'd imagine sone developers would want to wait for some critical mass of NVMe game drive install base before devoting resources too heavily towards DirectStorage. You look at the current gen consoles space, and aside from a handful of pure "next gen" titles, most new games have not fully taken advantage of asset streaming there, either, choosing to maintain backwards compatibility with Xbox One/PS4.

 

It's also worth mentioning that a ton of gamers are still using older GPUs that wouldn't be able to benefit greatly from DirectStorage anyways, mostly due to relatively small amounts of VRAM. There's always a cost ROI with these types of things, and unless the developer is focused on and has the freedom and resources to realize some new game vision that's not possible without DirectStorage, there's going to be a lot of inertia towards just doing things in the same old way and not having to worry about cutting out part of your potential customers.

 

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, Chris Pratt said:

This brings up some good points. A lot of gamers are still using SATA SSDs or even HDDs for game drives. I don't know if something like storage medium is captured on things like the Steam hardware survey, but I'd imagine sone developers would want to wait for some critical mass of NVMe game drive install base before devoting resources too heavily towards DirectStorage.

I can't see it on their website, but if I go to Help > System Information in the client, there is a storage section that lists number of SSDs and HDDs (both show zero for me though), but no NVMe count or performance numbers. Which is probably something you'd want to see (e.g. percentage of potential customers with >3 GB/s read speed)

 

1 hour ago, Chris Pratt said:

You look at the current gen consoles space, and aside from a handful of pure "next gen" titles, most new games have not fully taken advantage of asset streaming there, either, choosing to maintain backwards compatibility with Xbox One/PS4.

That's the issue with a technology like that. Not only is the benefit limited to people with the latest hardware. It can actually be detrimental to people who don't, unless you still optimize your assets to also be playable on HDD.

 

But then you're investing resources into implementing a tech that only a small percentage of customers will benefit from, while also still investing resources into making it work for everybody else. That could increase the size of your game, because now you need "normal" assets optimized for HDD, plus additional assets reserved for DirectStorage users, which might even lower sales.

 

That's a cost a company is not going to pay unless "next gen graphics" is the selling point, they are sponsored by AMD/Nvidia or it promises addition sales otherwise. I'm not sure we'll get to a point where people will refuse to buy a game unless it includes DirectStorage for some reason.

[Sawtaytoes]

Going to go against the grain here and say I don't agree with the assessment about games taking 3 years. Sure, some triple-A games take a while to release, but many of them are using existing engines and can easily add one feature for the next year's release.

 

I agree no games with DirectStorage support exist on Windows today, but I don't believe 3 years is accurate or even reasonable to assume.

 

PC users running Windows 11 are in the minority so even if people don't have compatible GPUs, that doesn't matter. Ray tracing is in games and that happened as soon as nVIDIA released their new graphics cards. There was no 3-year lag. The lag for both PlayStation and Xbox was 1 year meaning ray tracing was already built into their initial designs. And games came out with ray tracing at launch or close to launch.

 

Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S include some sort of DirectStorage feature already for their NVMe SSDs. In fact, Windows got DirectStorage from Xbox as far as I understand. There's also one other piece to DirectStorage on Xbox that has yet to come to Windows.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PS5 uses fast storage access for the portalling feature. Pretty sure the PS5's NVMe storage access API was a huge selling point. It was why some games couldn't release PC. The recent release of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered shows exactly the CPU bottlenecks you'll run into even with an NVMe SSD because of the lack of support for DirectStorage.

[SiliconNewbSD]

I come from the future to inform you the first Direct Storage title is releasing next month. The game is Forspoken and it's actually a pretty large title. They used the game to showcase how DS cut loading times on identical hardware. I don't think it'll be even close to what this tech will eventually allow, (massive, I mean massive, open worlds- with no shader comp stutter) but I think it should give us a taste of what's possible. I just hope the game isn't completely broken on launch and we actually get to appreciate the feature. Haha

[Sawtaytoes]

I upgraded to Win11 specifically for this feature and better HDR support. Happy to see games finally releasing with it!

I also noticed that only half of the spec released originally, but now we have a standard compression and decompression algorithm for it to use to get the full benefit.

[Franck]

On 9/5/2022 at 3:24 AM, Chris Pratt said:

You have to realize game development takes years, and something like DirectStorage is fundamental enough that a game needs to be designed around it.

Not really. The new version on windows 11 we got recently you simply need to update your DirectX libs and if you are using stream object in code it is already using direct storage upon updating so no code change required. The more advanced version does require some extra code but again it's not that much more coding. Maybe a dozen more lines or so. It is still easy change unless you wrote from scratch every single asset loading one by one in your code which is insanely stupid

[ewitte]

12 hours ago, Sawtaytoes said:

I upgraded to Win11 specifically for this feature and better HDR support. Happy to see games finally releasing with it!

I also noticed that only half of the spec released originally, but now we have a standard compression and decompression algorithm for it to use to get the full benefit.

It is something that was sold as a "feature" with Nvidia cards with the release of RTX 2000 series 4 years ago...

[Franck]

On 12/6/2022 at 4:25 PM, ewitte said:

It is something that was sold as a "feature" with Nvidia cards with the release of RTX 2000 series 4 years ago...

Very possible. In programing i don't remember when exactly we go option to use storage stream but that was at least 3-4 years ago so it make sense. Although what we have prior to this update is nowhere near the same performance. I am pretty sure the old way is just taking couple shortcuts by assuming things here and there to speed up a little bit storage access so i for sure it was not directly going from the GPU to the storage.

[Mark Kaine]

i dont see the relevance of ds anyway.  there are now games that load assets seamlessly, there are now games that feel like molasses... this isnt gonna change that.

 

what are actual real life advantages of ds anyway?  just seems like another buzzword... blast processing, anyone?

[QuantumSingularity]

18 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

i dont see the relevance of ds anyway.  there are now games that load assets seamlessly, there are now games that feel like molasses... this isnt gonna change that.

 

what are actual real life advantages of ds anyway?  just seems like another buzzword... blast processing, anyone?

It;s supposed to help with faster loading heavy assets and textures at high frames. If you have a good GPU, try driving fast, i mean really fast, 160MPH+  in Cyberpunk 2077 for more than 5 seconds and you will see that even in the Badlands, the assets and textures have trouble loading fast enough. But really it was going to be a blast in MMORPGs if those haven't died off already. 

[Mark Kaine]

1 minute ago, QuantumSingularity said:

It;s supposed to help with faster loading heavy assets and textures at high frames. If you have a good GPU, try driving fast, i mean really fast, 160MPH+  in Cyberpunk 2077 for more than 5 seconds and you will see that even in the Badlands, the assets and textures have trouble loading fast enough.

Ok, i see (makes sense in theory) 

But that is also why Cyberpunk is an awful example for anything performance related, it's an unoptimized mess and the devs would have found another way to f it up for sure.

Basically we'll have to see how helpful this is, maybe it'll just be a standard that everyone uses in the future,  but i don't see it being a big deal anytime soon.

 

[QuantumSingularity]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Ok, i see (makes sense in theory) 

But that is also why Cyberpunk is an awful example for anything performance related, it's an unoptimized mess and the devs would have found another way to f it up for sure.

Basically we'll have to see how helpful this is, maybe it'll just be a standard that everyone uses in the future,  but i don't see it being a big deal anytime soon.

 

Another field where this could be beneficial - MS Flight Simulator or any other open world game/sim where you get to fly and explore big areas in small amount of time or you have the transition between 2 areas with many details. In MS flught sim for example if you fly outside the plane, there are a ton of assets and textured being rendered for the environment and the plane, but not the cockpit. When you switch to cockpit cam, hundreds of switches, all of them interactable and with own textures appear all of a sudden. The sky is the limit with API that can fully utilize the storage transfer technologies. This will allow more high quality assets and textures. After all why going 8k if you textures are gonna be FHD at max??? True 4k textures will be next big thing and they'll need proper transfer speeds.

[Sawtaytoes]

On 12/10/2022 at 10:00 AM, Mark Kaine said:

i dont see the relevance of ds anyway.  there are now games that load assets seamlessly, there are now games that feel like molasses... this isnt gonna change that.

 

what are actual real life advantages of ds anyway?  just seems like another buzzword... blast processing, anyone?

Spider-man is the biggest example today. You're entirely CPU-limited on streaming data from disk.

 

When Unreal Engine 5 games come out, DirectStorage support will be even more important because it sends data in very small bursts.

 

The Digital Foundry video shows how limited we are by going through the CPU even with a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive: 

 

[Mark Kaine]

9 hours ago, Sawtaytoes said:

Spider-man is the biggest example today. You're entirely CPU-limited on streaming data from disk.

 

When Unreal Engine 5 games come out, DirectStorage support will be even more important because it sends data in very small bursts.

 

The Digital Foundry video shows how limited we are by going through the CPU even with a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive: 

 

as i said i can see this being a standard in the future,  i can also see this going nowhere...

 

but seriously what is up with the animations in this game, its all so stuttery and janky? i mean i did expect junk, but so much junk... everything looks and feels completely unrealistic , the physics are so bad, oof.

 

 

[QuantumSingularity]

On 12/12/2022 at 8:10 PM, Mark Kaine said:

as i said i can see this being a standard in the future,  i can also see this going nowhere...

 

but seriously what is up with the animations in this game, its all so stuttery and janky? i mean i did expect junk, but so much junk... everything looks and feels completely unrealistic , the physics are so bad, oof.

 

 

You can't expect too much from console ports. They are limited to somewhat mid-range CPUs, so they can't have such nice physics and particles as PCs do with high-end CPUs. It just wasn't present in the code, so unless someone starts building it from scratch, no way to make it better. I am curious though to see how Gran Turismo 7 will look like on PC. Driving physics are not its main strong point, but graphics for the car models are amongst the best in the business. Maybe they will take time to add good textures and details for the environment and track as well ?!

[Calzotron]

So there is one game that has been on this horizon/delayed. The first direct storage game we are getting is Forspoken. Should be out in a few months. 

[Sawtaytoes]

Forspoken is out, and while the performance is horrible, the game loads in 1 second over DirectStorage. This is INCREDIBLE! I wanna see every game using DirectStorage going forward; no excuses.

 

I saw a video of someone testing DirectStorage on a SATA SSD and a HDD as well as DigitalFoundry saying something about testing SATA SSDs, but none of this makes sense to me. Not one of my SATA SSDs support DirectStorage, so I was wondering why they're saying that.

Then looked around and found this quote from a Microsoft spokesperson in June 2021:

Quote

At a minimum, DirectStorage requires a PCIe 3.0+ NVMe SSD to store and run games that use the “Standard NVM Express Controller” driver and a DirectX12 GPU with Shader Model 6.0 support

Source: https://petri.com/microsoft-details-hardware-needed-to-use-directstorage-in-windows-11/

 

That means you cannot benefit from DirectStorage with an NVMe drive running PCIe 3.0 or higher.

 

This makes sense because DirectStorage is a direct PCIe connection from your GPU to the NVMe storage unit. You can run SATA or SAS over PCIe, but it doesn't provide the raw bandwidth necessary; therefore, those methods are unsupported.