NVIDIA eventually announced RTX IO a few days ago and the package of GPU-based decompression technologies was previously revealed alongside the RTX 30 Series graphics cards in 2020, but it finally made its debut this week with the surprising release of Portal: Prelude RTX.
Games can use RTX IO to offload ‘dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to the GPU, which is substantially faster at this type of work. This is part of a bigger shift in how game data is accessed by the various hardware components.
The assets are transmitted from the hard drive to the CPU, decompressed through system memory, and then delivered to the GPU in typical Input/Output. However, due to recent game asset size increases and bottlenecks between the CPU and RAM, this arrangement is less than ideal, especially now that machines are equipped with NVMe SSDs.
RTX IO expands I/O bandwidth by providing compressed data straight to the GPU with minimal staging’ in system memory.
The data is decompressed by the graphics card using the GDeflate open compression standard. This technique achieves high throughput and frees up the CPU to handle other tasks.
NVIDIA highlighted the faster texture load times and lower disk space afforded by RTX IO in their release. NVIDIA, for example, highlighted RTX IO’s 5X faster texture load speeds and 44% lower disk space in Portal: Prelude RTX in the slide below.
Any assistance in combating the horrible stuttering that has plagued many recent PC game releases is much appreciated. Unfortunately, Portal: Prelude RTX isn’t the perfect game to put such potential to the test.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will be released on PC next week by Insomniac and Nixxes. It will be the first game to support DirectStorage 1.2 with GPU-based decompression and RTX IO via the newest Game Ready driver.
