Microsoft’s long-awaited (perhaps-revolutionary) DirectStorage technology finally arrived on the PC this week in Forspoken. Initial testing studies confirmed encouraging but mildly perplexing outcomes, with some sections of the sport loading in below two seconds flat and continues out of your final save level being nearly instantaneous. Yes please! But it seems there’s a tradeoff: Your in-game body charges lower by about 10 %.

That’s what the workforce at Germany’s PC Games Hardware found whereas placing the Forspoken benchmark via its paces at 4K decision. The publication used a set testing rig consisting of a Core i9-12900K and Nvidia’s ferocious GeForce RTX 4090, then ran the benchmark from a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD, a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, and at last a SATA SSD. The SATA SSD doesn’t help DirectStorage, which requires an NVMe drive.

The finish end result? The SATA drive delivered the very best common body charge to the tune of 83.2 frames-per-second. The NVMe drives every averaged roughly 75 fps, a major 9.64 % pace discount. On the constructive aspect, the 1 % and 0.2 % body charges remained constant throughout all three drives, so DirectStorage didn’t have an effect on Forspoken’s moment-to-moment smoothness.

Update: There is concept on-line that PC Games Hardware incorrectly used the third-party software CapFrameX to measure its results, together with the longer (and higher-performing) black loading screens for the SATA drive, which might clearly improve the general body charge for that setup. We’ll replace this report with extra conclusive data after we obtain it.

One of DirectStorage’s key options is decompressing sport property in your graphics card quite than your processor, so it is sensible that general efficiency is impacted in a roundabout way. Still, a ten % body charge discount is eye opening. That’s roughly akin to the soar between an RTX 3080 and 3090, although in real-world phrases, the distinction between the SATA setup and the NVMe setups had been simply 8 frames-per-second.

These outcomes aren’t essentially common, nonetheless. The RTX 4090 is by far probably the most highly effective graphics card available on the market and PC Games Hardware solely examined at 4K decision. Performance scaling may change at decrease resolutions or on totally different GPUs with totally different architectures and reminiscence configurations. (Square Enix didn’t ship out PC overview copies, solely PlayStation 5 codes, so PC publications are nonetheless scrambling to check the brand new know-how.)

It’s additionally a little bit of an open query if Forspoken is an applicable champion for Microsoft’s ultra-fast new storage tech. Reviewers and users agree that the sport is a technical mess on the PC. With no different DirectStorage video games to check outcomes to, who is aware of if it’s working to its fullest skills right here?

One factor appears clear, although. There ain’t no such factor as a free lunch. DirectStorage might drastically cut back loading occasions below the proper circumstances, however offloading that work to the GPU has penalties elsewhere. It’ll take much more testing (and video games with DirectStorage help) to completely wrap our heads round every little thing Microsoft’s forward-looking storage know-how has to supply. There’s a Forspoken demo available if you wish to strive it your self!