DirectStorage to be showcased during GDC 2022's presentation of Forspoken

Daniel Sims

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Highly anticipated: PC gamers have long wondered when they would see games that use DirectStorage to take full advantage of fast (and expensive) SSDs. We now know of one game that is showing off the feature before launching this fall.

One of AMD's presentations at the 2022 Game Developers Conference will cover various technologies powering Square Enix's upcoming open-world game Forspoken. One of those technologies is DirectStorage, making Forspoken the first PC game confirmed to take advantage of the feature.

Developer Luminous Productions and AMD will detail how the game uses FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), ray tracing, and other graphics features. The presentation will show DirectStorage in action and offer advice on how to use it in future games.

Recently delayed, Forspoken is set to launch on October 11 for PlayStation 5 and PC.

Microsoft released the DirectStorage API earlier this week, so developers can start implementing it on Windows games. The feature optimizes I/O pipelines to fully take advantage of SSDs, giving games ultra-fast resume and load times similar to what we see in PS5 and Xbox Series titles. Although current generation consoles use NVMe SSDs to get those load times along with other advantages, on PC even older PCIe 3.0 SATA SSDs should benefit from DirectStorage.

There's a chance we may see the next generation of FSR utilized in Forspoken at GDC, as the presentation on that game will come a few hours after AMD's planned talk covering image upscaling in future games. AMD is expected to announce FSR 2.0 on very soon. It will use temporal upscaling to achieve better image quality compared to the current FSR implementation while also improving performance.

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Looking forward to it. Hopefully I don't see my SSDs throttling their throughput because their temperatures are above the throttling threshold.
 
Looking forward to it. Hopefully I don't see my SSDs throttling their throughput because their temperatures are above the throttling threshold.

Disk writes increase temperatures beyond the throttling point, but I'm guessing that games will mostly read data, as it is already stored.
 
What I‘m really curious about is if there is a noticeable difference between storage connected directly to the CPU vs via the chipset.
 
Will this type of technology start affecting the overall lifespan of a typical SSD drive. I only have the one SSD and that holds my OS. the last thing I want to do is play a game with this technology which runs my primary drive into the ground.

 
Will this type of technology start affecting the overall lifespan of a typical SSD drive. I only have the one SSD and that holds my OS. the last thing I want to do is play a game with this technology which runs my primary drive into the ground.
It shouldn't games do a lot of reading which does not affect the drives endurance. Games generally only write settings and save files, and now days a lot of those are stored in the cloud. So I wouldn't worry about DirectStorage affecting the lifespan of the drive.
 
Will this type of technology start affecting the overall lifespan of a typical SSD drive. I only have the one SSD and that holds my OS. the last thing I want to do is play a game with this technology which runs my primary drive into the ground.
It shouldn't games do a lot of reading which does not affect the drives endurance. Games generally only write settings and save files, and now days a lot of those are stored in the cloud. So I wouldn't worry about DirectStorage affecting the lifespan of the drive.
That, and the game is going to load up this data anyways. This is just a more direct way of accessing it... lol
 
Most open world games dont do much after well...loading the world, would probably be better to use another type of game that has constant load screens like a fighter or something.
 
Most open world games dont do much after well...loading the world, would probably be better to use another type of game that has constant load screens like a fighter or something.
Open world games stand to benefit substantially from this tech. LOD's can be fine tuned so you don't get distant pop-in, higher resolution textures, No loading going in and out of city's or buildings, quick travel might not even require a load screen anymore, Flying around the map should also be much smoother as it can load in map data all that much faster.

This tech stands to benefit almost everything. Their is no drawbacks for once. we're finally moving on from the HDD era.
 
See why can't this be game agnostic and not need games to be written to take advantage of it just make it part of DirectX
 
Open world games stand to benefit substantially from this tech. LOD's can be fine tuned so you don't get distant pop-in, higher resolution textures, No loading going in and out of city's or buildings, quick travel might not even require a load screen anymore, Flying around the map should also be much smoother as it can load in map data all that much faster.

This tech stands to benefit almost everything. Their is no drawbacks for once. we're finally moving on from the HDD era.
Less pop-in is always a good thing :)
 
Less pop-in is always a good thing :)
I recently played through Horizon: Forbidden West, On PS5 in the 4k 30fps mode and it looked absolutely incredible the whole time, completely stable framerate throughout, it was a great experience.

However, once you get to fly or move around at a decent speed, you start to notice pop-in. distant mountains just suddenly take shape and are detailed or you see villages suddenly pop into detail.

In a world that looks soo good and is very detailed near the player, it's actually super distracting once you notice it. The PS5 hardware can definitely cope with the higher detail, I'm guessing because it's a cross-gen game, the engine hasn't been fully optimised for this extra SSD capability's yet.

Hopefully over the next few years we'll finally see developers halt support for the old gen of consoles and focus on the current gen.
 
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