Windows 11 DirectStorage API to load games blazing fast
Microsoft has just unveiled Windows 11 and among its best features, we couldn’t but note the inclusion of DirectStorage API.
This cutting-edge technology will allow PC games to be loaded directly from the video card and generally make gaming a lot faster.
Microsoft is betting heavily on gaming with the upcoming version and to give people another reason to upgrade, DirectStorage will only be available to Windows 11. The feature will be exclusive and not shared with Windows 10 or Windows 7.
Originally present on Xbox consoles and announced to migrate to PC back in September 2020, the soon-available API technology is considered to be very beneficial for PC gaming.
How will DirectStorage API load games faster on PC?
Featured in the Xbox Series X and Series S, DirectStorage is a breakthrough technology that takes advantage of high-performance NVMe SSD to load games directly through the GPU.
Part of the Xbox Velocity Architecture, this technology allows modern games to continuously load parts of the world while you move from other sources than the CPU.
In a normal Windows 10 environment, areas that are soon to be unveiled take up a toll on the CPU and have a higher loading priority than physics or loading NPCs in the scene.
With DirectStorage, the CPU load on this specific task is being reduced from multiple cores to just taking a small fraction of a single core.
Beneficial for gamers worldwide, this feature will also change a bit the way how developers are programming resource consumption.
Having a stronger partner to take on a significant portion of the CPU load, future games might bet bigger on visuals that can now be processed by DirectStorage.
And don’t forget, this will be only on Windows 11. Time to dust off that XP…
