Luminous Productions has revealed that Forspoken, its next game, will be one of the first games to embrace Microsoft’s DirectStorage technology. Teppei Ono, Luminous’ Technical Director, used a film that was partially put online today to demonstrate the performance advantages that may be expected when using the new DirectStorage subsystem.
The transition from the loading screen to Forspoken’s amazing open-world took only 1.7 seconds. Complex scenes made up of about 20,000 files (weighing in at 4.5 GB) took only 1.7 seconds.
For this initial scene, Luminous gave further data on throughput for the various storage systems, and the findings are eye-opening. The M.2 SSD achieved a throughput of 4,839 MB/s while using the DirectStorage API. Under the Win32 API, the same drive delivered nearly half that, at 2,826 MB/s.
It appears that there is still a bottleneck in place: one may anticipate load times to be affected in the same way as throughput, but this isn’t the case. In DirectStorage, a 71% increase in SSD throughput compared to Win32 only results in a 0.2 second (about 10%) reduction in load times, from 2.1 seconds to 1.9 seconds.
One reason for this could be because, despite DirectStorage’s advancements, Forspoken is still hitting a CPU wall. Perhaps the still-missing GPU acceleration component in DirectStorage, which Microsoft is still working on, will help matters even more. The developers hope they’ll be able to reduce load times to under one second in the future, although this should be considered the exception rather than the rule.
The second scene has the quickest load times. All three storage systems had almost the same performance ratio: the M.2 SSD took 1.7 seconds to complete, while the SATA drive took 3.2 seconds. The HDD finished in last position with a time of 19.9 seconds, as expected.
Forspoken was supposed to be released on May 25th, but a recent delay pushed it back five months to October 11th. If only the Forspoken release could take advantage of DirectStorage as well.
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