DirectStorage Signals The End Of SATA SSDs
video description
1) Allow COPY of texture folder to SYSTEM MEMORY (i.e. DDR4) on game start if sufficient DDR4 space exists (slow SSD/HDD would then be sufficient),
2) Allow auto COPY from a slow to fast SSD during initial game load (so you can buy a much smaller SSD to act as a buffer; would add very LITTLE time),
3) Stream UNCOMPRESSED texture data if the SSD and PCIe bandwidth are sufficient (shouldn't need a special GPU decompressor)
In short, you shouldn't need to buy a large, expensive SSD to store Direct Storage games on if there are ways to work around this that work fine.
Would also like to see a FAST RESUME method that works with the above. Such as using a fast, 512GB M.2 SSD solely for copying textures AND copying game states. A demanding game might have 40GB used (20GB for the texture folder, and 20GB for the VRAM+System memory game states).
Date: 2023-02-03
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Comments and reviews: 14
John
So far I have YET to see a video that gives me good info about DirectStorage and whether it does anything other than speed up a load time.
I have heard it's faster, it's slower, etc..... during GAMEPLAY. Gameplay is what I care about, not the load time where I often pause anyway.
My understanding of DirectStorage and please correct what's wrong here, is that it can stream data directly to your GPU DURING gameplay. If this is true that has repercussions, one being your GPU is taking on more responsibility for decompressing the data that ONLY goes to the GPU (because game data doesn't go to the GPU to be decompressed and THEN go to memory to be used by the CPU).
So, we have 2 distinct flows of data. There is data that the CPU really doesn't need to process because it's strictly for making images, and then there is data that HAS to go to the CPU and ONLY the CPU, which is data about the assets around you that you can interact with, where you are, movement data, etc.... This is data the CPU needs. Then there is data that has to be processed by the CPU and this feeds information to the GPU.
So, talking about ONE system with DirectStorage doesn't show anything, even ONE system using 3 different SSDs tells me very little.
So for one, a good breakdown of DIrectStorage usage during gameplay is needed. It's very possible that I run a system without enabling DirectStorage and my FPS is better, because the GPU is not busier doing decompression. If all I gain is a few seconds off a load time it doesn't mean that much to me and I don't know if that's beneficial. ALL the data that the GPU needs when going through a certain map is not loaded to the GPU memory at load time. That's a huge amount of data, and it's mostly dependent on what the character is doing, although information about how to paint a specific object I believe would go straight to the GPU from memory.
So the next thing I thought this would benefit is getting RID of loadpoints, or at least some loadpoints because the storage can stream data to the GPU during gameplay and the GPU can decompress it. For instance with the Sony PS5 that's exactly what that system can do and it can also stream data to RAM during gameplay because it has a dedicated decompression circuit where the output can either go to RAM or VRAM, if I remember correctly.
So without knowing the fine details of what DirectStorage is doing with a SPECIFIC game, any testing done is worthless to me personally because I don't know what it is I'm seeing. So if Forspoken is going to be the poster child for DirectStorage I personally, without regard to other people and THEIR understanding, need to understand EXACTLY what DirectStorage is doing in the game for me to understand what I'm seeing.
And I don't need a bunch of people guessing at what it's doing and commenting. I need the information from the game company about what DS is doing with their game. Just a wild guess, but I think this could vary from game to game.
reply
So far I have YET to see a video that gives me good info about DirectStorage and whether it does anything other than speed up a load time.
I have heard it's faster, it's slower, etc..... during GAMEPLAY. Gameplay is what I care about, not the load time where I often pause anyway.
My understanding of DirectStorage and please correct what's wrong here, is that it can stream data directly to your GPU DURING gameplay. If this is true that has repercussions, one being your GPU is taking on more responsibility for decompressing the data that ONLY goes to the GPU (because game data doesn't go to the GPU to be decompressed and THEN go to memory to be used by the CPU).
So, we have 2 distinct flows of data. There is data that the CPU really doesn't need to process because it's strictly for making images, and then there is data that HAS to go to the CPU and ONLY the CPU, which is data about the assets around you that you can interact with, where you are, movement data, etc.... This is data the CPU needs. Then there is data that has to be processed by the CPU and this feeds information to the GPU.
So, talking about ONE system with DirectStorage doesn't show anything, even ONE system using 3 different SSDs tells me very little.
So for one, a good breakdown of DIrectStorage usage during gameplay is needed. It's very possible that I run a system without enabling DirectStorage and my FPS is better, because the GPU is not busier doing decompression. If all I gain is a few seconds off a load time it doesn't mean that much to me and I don't know if that's beneficial. ALL the data that the GPU needs when going through a certain map is not loaded to the GPU memory at load time. That's a huge amount of data, and it's mostly dependent on what the character is doing, although information about how to paint a specific object I believe would go straight to the GPU from memory.
So the next thing I thought this would benefit is getting RID of loadpoints, or at least some loadpoints because the storage can stream data to the GPU during gameplay and the GPU can decompress it. For instance with the Sony PS5 that's exactly what that system can do and it can also stream data to RAM during gameplay because it has a dedicated decompression circuit where the output can either go to RAM or VRAM, if I remember correctly.
So without knowing the fine details of what DirectStorage is doing with a SPECIFIC game, any testing done is worthless to me personally because I don't know what it is I'm seeing. So if Forspoken is going to be the poster child for DirectStorage I personally, without regard to other people and THEIR understanding, need to understand EXACTLY what DirectStorage is doing in the game for me to understand what I'm seeing.
And I don't need a bunch of people guessing at what it's doing and commenting. I need the information from the game company about what DS is doing with their game. Just a wild guess, but I think this could vary from game to game.
reply
Jeffrey
IMO the console SSD config was a slight mistake...
While it's very forward looking, the cost of fast SSD memory was VERY expensive and still isn't cheap. I think they should have had two SSD speeds. 128GB of fast SSD memory (same as current), and 1TB of slower memory (i.e. typical 512MBps). Games would be INSTALLED only to the 1TB SSD. When you start a game the first time, it loads as per normal EXCEPT the texture folder gets copied to the fast SSD space. QUICK RESUME would also use this space. I doubt games would need much more than 20GB in total so you could probably have TEN GAMES at least (on average) working this way... for normal, non-Direct Storage games the faster SSD wouldn't matter much for initial game loading... it wouldn't even make much difference in initial load times for the Direct Storage games as SSD speed doesn't have a huge impact on initial game load, and the copy of the texture folder to the fast might only add 10 seconds at most (perhaps almost NONE since the SSD isn't the main bottleneck). And again, then the 2nd time you start the game you're using the QUICK RESUME which would be IDENTICAL in speed to current console's... and with this method you could even have Direct Storage work from an HDD since you aren't streaming from the storage drive.
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IMO the console SSD config was a slight mistake...
While it's very forward looking, the cost of fast SSD memory was VERY expensive and still isn't cheap. I think they should have had two SSD speeds. 128GB of fast SSD memory (same as current), and 1TB of slower memory (i.e. typical 512MBps). Games would be INSTALLED only to the 1TB SSD. When you start a game the first time, it loads as per normal EXCEPT the texture folder gets copied to the fast SSD space. QUICK RESUME would also use this space. I doubt games would need much more than 20GB in total so you could probably have TEN GAMES at least (on average) working this way... for normal, non-Direct Storage games the faster SSD wouldn't matter much for initial game loading... it wouldn't even make much difference in initial load times for the Direct Storage games as SSD speed doesn't have a huge impact on initial game load, and the copy of the texture folder to the fast might only add 10 seconds at most (perhaps almost NONE since the SSD isn't the main bottleneck). And again, then the 2nd time you start the game you're using the QUICK RESUME which would be IDENTICAL in speed to current console's... and with this method you could even have Direct Storage work from an HDD since you aren't streaming from the storage drive.
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Long
Yeah..... Nah.
It was said years ago that the SSD would kill the HDD within 10-Years of the first batch of consumer SSD's hitting the market, that was 2010....
Here we are 10-Years later and HDD's are still INCREDIBLY common, although most new systems ship with low capacity QLC SSD's, many high capacity storage arrays still REQUIRE HDD's in order to meet cost demands of large deployment customers.
NVMe drives are of course much faster, but much of the bottlenecks in games can't be fixed with a single proprietary API, you can't magic away the core design of modern game engines.
And, gaining a few seconds over a SATA SSD doesn't make it irrelevant either, very few people really care about saving a second if it costs a lot more money to do so, NVMe drives still need to drop further in price, as will happen in the next 5-Years hopefully.
HDD's won't completely die out as their are failure models that a HDD can be saved from but a SSD cannot, so, for backing up CRITICAL (Not Regular User) Data, HDD's will still have a place on some shelves around the world.
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Yeah..... Nah.
It was said years ago that the SSD would kill the HDD within 10-Years of the first batch of consumer SSD's hitting the market, that was 2010....
Here we are 10-Years later and HDD's are still INCREDIBLY common, although most new systems ship with low capacity QLC SSD's, many high capacity storage arrays still REQUIRE HDD's in order to meet cost demands of large deployment customers.
NVMe drives are of course much faster, but much of the bottlenecks in games can't be fixed with a single proprietary API, you can't magic away the core design of modern game engines.
And, gaining a few seconds over a SATA SSD doesn't make it irrelevant either, very few people really care about saving a second if it costs a lot more money to do so, NVMe drives still need to drop further in price, as will happen in the next 5-Years hopefully.
HDD's won't completely die out as their are failure models that a HDD can be saved from but a SSD cannot, so, for backing up CRITICAL (Not Regular User) Data, HDD's will still have a place on some shelves around the world.
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Jeffrey
the number we ACTUALLY need...
Load times are important, but we really need to see where the cutoff is before you get STUTTER in-game because textures can't load in fast enough. That will vary by the game. If a slower SSD works fine in-game but just loads in six seconds instead of two seconds I'm certainly not spending more money for the fast SSD (or worse upgrading my motherboard etc just for a faster SSD). In my other post I also recommend that games are flexible so they can copy from slow to fast SSD or system memory so you don't need to have the game installed to a fast SSD in theory... if I had Windows 11 on a fast, 512GB SSD (i.e. 8GBps) then maybe I want the ability to dedicate 200GB as the Direct Storage game buffer (and FAST RESUME when that comes to PC) rather than buy another 1TB SSD just so I can install Direct Storage games to it. Or worse, buy the expensive, fast SSD and only have a couple games that even need Direct Storage.
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the number we ACTUALLY need...
Load times are important, but we really need to see where the cutoff is before you get STUTTER in-game because textures can't load in fast enough. That will vary by the game. If a slower SSD works fine in-game but just loads in six seconds instead of two seconds I'm certainly not spending more money for the fast SSD (or worse upgrading my motherboard etc just for a faster SSD). In my other post I also recommend that games are flexible so they can copy from slow to fast SSD or system memory so you don't need to have the game installed to a fast SSD in theory... if I had Windows 11 on a fast, 512GB SSD (i.e. 8GBps) then maybe I want the ability to dedicate 200GB as the Direct Storage game buffer (and FAST RESUME when that comes to PC) rather than buy another 1TB SSD just so I can install Direct Storage games to it. Or worse, buy the expensive, fast SSD and only have a couple games that even need Direct Storage.
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itech
I think that Square didn't do any of the old tricks that game devs did with HDDs back in the day, A lot of times they would put in assets multiple times in the files so the spinning of the drive wouldn't have to seek randomly which can take much longer. As opposed to SSDs which are pretty king at it with no moving parts. I certainly don't blame Square, since even consoles are fully SSDs now, but yeah. I think that means that SATA SSDs are going to be fine for years to come as well, but if the cost is the same and you have an M.2 PCIe slot, I'd say its more important than ever to go PCIe M.2 when building now.
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I think that Square didn't do any of the old tricks that game devs did with HDDs back in the day, A lot of times they would put in assets multiple times in the files so the spinning of the drive wouldn't have to seek randomly which can take much longer. As opposed to SSDs which are pretty king at it with no moving parts. I certainly don't blame Square, since even consoles are fully SSDs now, but yeah. I think that means that SATA SSDs are going to be fine for years to come as well, but if the cost is the same and you have an M.2 PCIe slot, I'd say its more important than ever to go PCIe M.2 when building now.
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Anonymous
Is Direct Storage only active on the C Drive? even though you are running the game from another drive it's still copying over to the C Drive not direct from the drive the game is running from
I did windows key+g and on my system it says only C Drive is Direct Storage which is the nvme drive but I also have the Samsung 870 qvo 2tb as my D Drive and that is saying it not Direct Storage becasue it isn't a nvme drive, it must be copying across to the C Drive or the test needs to be the Sata Drives as primary C Drive to see and not as a secondary drive? I may of course be wrong which isn't unheard of
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Is Direct Storage only active on the C Drive? even though you are running the game from another drive it's still copying over to the C Drive not direct from the drive the game is running from
I did windows key+g and on my system it says only C Drive is Direct Storage which is the nvme drive but I also have the Samsung 870 qvo 2tb as my D Drive and that is saying it not Direct Storage becasue it isn't a nvme drive, it must be copying across to the C Drive or the test needs to be the Sata Drives as primary C Drive to see and not as a secondary drive? I may of course be wrong which isn't unheard of
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Ond ej
Your Avocado benchmark results seems surprisingly low to me. I am running a 2TB WD SN850 (Gen4 NVMe) with an i9-12900K + RTX 4090 and I am getting around 0.43s load with 20 GB/s bandwidth which significantly exceeds your Gen4 NVMe results - wonder why? The only thing that comes to mind is that I have VBS (virtualization based security) disabled while your prebuilt probably has it enabled. I don't like it, because it eats some CPU cycles as well as storage IOPS and as far as I am concerned, the performance loss is simply not acceptable, but that's just my choice.
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Your Avocado benchmark results seems surprisingly low to me. I am running a 2TB WD SN850 (Gen4 NVMe) with an i9-12900K + RTX 4090 and I am getting around 0.43s load with 20 GB/s bandwidth which significantly exceeds your Gen4 NVMe results - wonder why? The only thing that comes to mind is that I have VBS (virtualization based security) disabled while your prebuilt probably has it enabled. I don't like it, because it eats some CPU cycles as well as storage IOPS and as far as I am concerned, the performance loss is simply not acceptable, but that's just my choice.
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Bill
SATA SSDs will be around for a long time because loading a system with m.2 drives will murder a high end graphics card due to lack of PCI express lanes and it doesn't make sense to pay more for bulk storage when 99.999% of games won't benefit appreciably from it.
I love the MSI test system, probably 3 times more expensive than it needs to be and will break in half the time. They could at least use a real test bench and not this shill crap. Can you imagine GN or Hardware Unboxed using that for a story?
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SATA SSDs will be around for a long time because loading a system with m.2 drives will murder a high end graphics card due to lack of PCI express lanes and it doesn't make sense to pay more for bulk storage when 99.999% of games won't benefit appreciably from it.
I love the MSI test system, probably 3 times more expensive than it needs to be and will break in half the time. They could at least use a real test bench and not this shill crap. Can you imagine GN or Hardware Unboxed using that for a story?
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Peter
I call nonsense on the statement in the title. SATA-SSD's will remain useful for two reason: mass-storage (more silent and not as laggy and slow as hard drives) and expandibility. Even with 4 NVMe-slots (new high-end motherboards) the number of SSD's still is a bit lagging. Practically speaking you just need 1 or 2 fast NVMe-SSD's for your operat ing system, system-libraries, installed programs and games, the rest can be regular SATA-SSD's or qlc NVMe for music, video's, PDF's, virtual machines...
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I call nonsense on the statement in the title. SATA-SSD's will remain useful for two reason: mass-storage (more silent and not as laggy and slow as hard drives) and expandibility. Even with 4 NVMe-slots (new high-end motherboards) the number of SSD's still is a bit lagging. Practically speaking you just need 1 or 2 fast NVMe-SSD's for your operat ing system, system-libraries, installed programs and games, the rest can be regular SATA-SSD's or qlc NVMe for music, video's, PDF's, virtual machines...
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Vdgamer
Lol, his conclusion is ridiculous! Sata ssds are/will be fine for 99% of games out there, only the newest AAA games with extremely large assets will benefit from direct storage and fast nvme drives.
So because one or two games will load slower by few seconds on your SSD you should get rid of it. Don't mind the other 100 games that won't have any difference. Brilliant conclusion Gordon
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Lol, his conclusion is ridiculous! Sata ssds are/will be fine for 99% of games out there, only the newest AAA games with extremely large assets will benefit from direct storage and fast nvme drives.
So because one or two games will load slower by few seconds on your SSD you should get rid of it. Don't mind the other 100 games that won't have any difference. Brilliant conclusion Gordon
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Kenchan1337
new tech is only interesting if it gets put to use.
in the past years we've gotten RTX, much beefier CPU's and better storage! and i feel NO DRIVE AT ALL to upgrade because there isn't a single game to win me over, GREAT JOB! (that's my wallet speaking).
i'll check back when they work out how to best put the new tech to use and make some cool games with it.
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new tech is only interesting if it gets put to use.
in the past years we've gotten RTX, much beefier CPU's and better storage! and i feel NO DRIVE AT ALL to upgrade because there isn't a single game to win me over, GREAT JOB! (that's my wallet speaking).
i'll check back when they work out how to best put the new tech to use and make some cool games with it.
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Spillerrec
This needed to be a test with and without DirectStorage to make sense, as this just shows a faster drive gives lower load times. (And no counter examples showing several non-DirectStorage games not being able to scale linearly.) I see the game supports Win10, wouldn't that be a good way to show if DirectStorage does anything significant?
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This needed to be a test with and without DirectStorage to make sense, as this just shows a faster drive gives lower load times. (And no counter examples showing several non-DirectStorage games not being able to scale linearly.) I see the game supports Win10, wouldn't that be a good way to show if DirectStorage does anything significant?
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giorgos
these tests are not usefull, direct storage or not, m.2 drives are far faster than sata ssd or hdd so testing speeds between them is moot, m.2 is always going to come on top. for proper testing, benchmark just one m2, with and without DS and check speeds and cpu utilization. i'm guessing it might make a small difference in specific loads.
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these tests are not usefull, direct storage or not, m.2 drives are far faster than sata ssd or hdd so testing speeds between them is moot, m.2 is always going to come on top. for proper testing, benchmark just one m2, with and without DS and check speeds and cpu utilization. i'm guessing it might make a small difference in specific loads.
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Luke
Great video.
What if I only have 1 m.2 drive slot? Would it be beneficial to go sata ssd boot drive and nvme game drive? That is the backyard builder type of choice I want to answer. Do the speeds change with direct storage if I run the game and the OS off the same drive vs 2 separate drives? So many more questions
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Great video.
What if I only have 1 m.2 drive slot? Would it be beneficial to go sata ssd boot drive and nvme game drive? That is the backyard builder type of choice I want to answer. Do the speeds change with direct storage if I run the game and the OS off the same drive vs 2 separate drives? So many more questions
reply
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