Enabling DirectStorage In Forspoken Will Deliver Faster Loading Times At The Cost of Lower FPS

The first game to feature Microsoft's brand new DirectStorage technology, Forspoken, is now available and while the reviews have been quite mediocre, the new tech is something to look forward to.

In our own tests, we saw that the Microsoft DirectStorage technology offers some of the lowest load times for games, with an entire Forspoken savegame taking mere seconds to go from the menu to in-game, though results can vary. The technology is definitely going a major deal and will be helpful in bringing console-like loading times to the PC ecosystem.

Microsoft's DirectStorage technology can be enabled on PCIe SSDs. It works well with NVMe SSDs but there are still products that need to be compliant to fully utilize it. Currently, there's no list of DirectStorage devices besides a few devices that officially mention DirectStorage compliancy over them. The only way to know if your PC is DirectStorage ready is to check through the Xbox Game Bar on your PC which can be brought up using the Windows Key + G function. You'll get the full list of devices on your PC that are DirectStorage compliant as the screenshot below:

Now PCGamesHardware took Forspoken to the test on a system that was running an Intel Core i9-12900K and a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. The PC was tested with three different devices for storage, a PCIe Gen 4, PCIe Gen 3, and a SATA SSD. The performance was evaluated through the in-game benchmark and the results are well interesting.

Using DirectStorage across all three devices, had similar 1% and 0.1% figures but the average FPS is where things get interesting. The SATA SSD which wasn't running DirectStorage delivered 83.2 FPS versus the 74.4 and 75.3 FPS of the Gen 4 and Gen 3 SSDs, respectively. The SATA SSD producing a higher average framerate than the PCIe devices running DirectStorage makes it seem like the technology puts a slight toll on the GPU resources leading to a performance impact of up to 10%.

All the performance tests were done at 4K and we have seen that Forspoken isn't necessarily a very optimized title for the visual quality it has on display. Unless or until you are using a certain upsampling method such as DLSS/FSR/XeSS, the game will produce around 60-70 FPS at 4K max quality and a 10% drop in FPS could lead to sub-60 FPS on even the highest-end gaming PCs. With the aforementioned upsampling methods, you can get over 100 FPS but for users who want native quality, a smooth frame rate may not be possible using DirectStorage.

With that said, this is just the first showcase of Microsoft's DirectStorage technology and we hope that future gaming titles that use it will come with a better-optimized engine than what we got in Forspoken.

News Source: Videocardz