DirectStorage is Microsoft’s way of speeding up loading times in games and allowing developers to take better advantage of fast SSDs. It’s sure to be a major step towards even more impressive and expansive games once it’s actually available on any device, but even before we get our hands on it, Microsoft is making it a lot better.

Following the release of the DirectStorage API in March (opens in new tab) (time flies), Microsoft has announced DirectStorage 1.1. Essentially, the latest version adds GPU decompression to the proceedings, which offloads the time-consuming decompression work from your CPU to your highly parallel GPU.

Traditionally, compressed game assets are transferred from your storage media (mostly an SSD these days) to system memory, where your CPU will decompress the assets before transferring them to your GPU as needed.

With DirectStorage 1.1, you can skip much of this and take a much more direct route. Assets are transferred from an NVMe SSD (DirectStorage 1.0 already speeds up this process) and transferred directly to the GPU for decompression. This saves seconds or more in load times for assets.

“… cutscenes are loading almost 3x faster and the CPU is almost completely freed up to be used on other game processes,” Microsoft confirms.

The end result should be faster game loading on PC, something we’ve seen the more proprietary Xbox and PlayStation console architectures have an advantage in for a while now. Though following the first wave of games, when DirectStorage-compatible PCs are more ubiquitous, developers should be able to really push the boundaries of what a game can be with more flexibility in load times, asset quality, and scale.

That's it, there are some requirements for DirectStorage and also specifically DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU decompression:

• Windows 10 or Windows 11—Microsoft expects the biggest improvement in Windows 11, but “both Windows 10 and Windows 11 will see gains from an efficient GPU decompression implementation.”
• An NVMe SSD— preferably a very fast one, like a high-speed PCIe 4.0 drive. Perhaps PCIe 5.0 drives will be even better when they arrive next year.
• Any DirectX 12 GPU that supports Shader Model 6.0—This shader model has been around for a while, so most modern GPUs should be sufficient. However, Microsoft recommends a DX12 Ultimate-compatible card, which is basically one with RT support and support for a few other important new rendering features.
• A DirectStorage compatible game— It’s all well and good to have the hardware, but you need the software to put it all together. This is the piece of the puzzle that we are still missing today.

There are no DirectStorage games at the moment, unfortunately. We'd expect to see the technology arrive first in Forspoken, though that game was late in summer By 2023, kicking DirectStorage could also happen. Whether it will still be the first game with DirectStorage now, we can't be sure, but Forspoken is due out in January now, so that's probably still our best bet.

To make DirectStorage work, Microsoft and Nvidia teamed up to introduce a new compression format, provided by Nvidia, called GDeflate.

This new file format is supposedly lossless, but allows for “GPU-optimized high-throughput decompression with compression ratios similar to deflation.

“GDeflate saves CPU cycles by offloading expensive decompression operations to the GPU, while saving system interconnect bandwidth and disk space at the same time,” says Microsoft’s blog on DirectStorage 1.1.

Don’t worry, though, GDeflate isn’t proprietary to Nvidia GPUs. You may have heard of Nvidia’s own RTX IO technology, which will be used in conjunction with DirectStorage, but AMD also has its own SmartAccess storage technology that sounds somewhat similar. Intel also has some plans for DirectStorage, it seems, with all three GPU companies (it’s still weird that there are three now) set to support GDeflate. That should mean all the latest cards are capable of utilizing the new format when the time comes.

With DirectStorage almost a year into its existence for developers, I suspect that 2023 will be the year we get our hands on some good games that actually support the technology. This should coincide with new releases of GPUs, PCIe 5.0 SSDs, and fast CPUs. All our PC gaming ducks are in a row.

You can check if your PC is DirectStorage ready (opens in new tab) using Microsoft Game Bar.