Microsoft has formally announced that the much anticipated DirectStorage API, promised to be the savior of loading times in games primarily, is now available. With DirectStorage, developers can now access high-speed SSDs faster and utilize their bandwidth to further enhance experience on PCs.
In a recent blog post by the DirectX team, Microsoft is now officially making the API available to Windows games. This means that non-Microsoft Studios game devs now have access to the API which enables to leverage faster storage.
There is a catch though: No GPU accelerated decompression. This is one of the most heavily anticipated aspect of this API and at the time launch, the decompression will be purely done on CPU instead of the GPU. It will take a bit of time but developers are expected to play with the API on their DirectX 12 titles and hopefully land on GPUs soon.
NVIDIA’s RTX IO is based on the DirectStorage API and is one of the key-selling points of the RTX 30-series on launch. It will soon be 3-years but the tech has yet to surface.
