Windows 10: DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Compression improves game loading significantly

GHacks · Oct 14, 2022

Microsoft announced in 2020 that the DirectStorage API would come to its Windows operating system. DirectStorage, which debuted on Microsoft's Xbox console, promises faster loading times by reducing CPU overhead and increasing IO throughput.

First thought to be a Windows 11 exclusive, Microsoft revealed a year later that DirectStorage would also find its way on PCs running Windows 10. The company released the first stable version of the DirectStorage API for Windows in March 2022.

DirectStorage requires that games are installed on fast NVMe drives, as the benefit of the technology is the largest in this case. Gamers may still see loading improvements on slower hard drives, but not nearly as much.

Microsoft offered a sneak peek of the upcoming DirectStorage 1.1 API for Windows yesterday. One of the main new features of the updated API is support for GPU decompression.

GPU decompression promises faster loading times by moving decompression processes from the CPU to the GPU. Most compression algorithms have been optimized for CPUs in the past, and the majority of games uses CPUs for decompression tasks currently.

With DirectStorage 1.1 comes the option to move the decompression tasks to the GPU. Microsoft created "a highly optimized sample" to benchmark the loading of assets using the CPU and GPU. According to Microsoft, GPU decompression improved the loading time almost by the factor 3. An additional benefit is the dropping of the CPU load during the tasks.

Translated into real-world numbers, the decompression time was reduced from 2.36 to 0.80 seconds, and the CPU load dropped from 100% to 15.08%. The gains are promising, but independent verification is needed.

Windows gamers do need to understand that values may differ depending on the hardware of their devices.

DirectStorage games are compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 according to Microsoft, but Windows 11's implementation features further optimizations not available on Windows 10. Games that use the new API will see decompression improvements, which will translate to faster loading times.

As far as required hardware is concerned. The new GPU decompression feature requires a DirectX 12 capable GPU supporting Shader Model 6.0. To benefit from faster loading times in general, Microsoft recommends fast NVMe SSD storage devices and saving games on them.

Now You: do you play games on Windows?

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Brink · Oct 14, 2022

DirectStorage SDK 1.0.2

Thank you to everyone who tried out the DirectStorage SDK – we’ve really enjoyed interacting with you on the #directstorage channel on the D3D12 Discord Server, and on github.

Today we’re releasing an update to the SDK where we’ve addressed some of the feedback you’ve sent us!

You can update to the latest using NuGet update. Visit https://aka.ms/directstorage for more information about how to get started.

Changelog

Public symbols are now available on the Microsoft public symbols server

Improved DirectStorage performance on Win10 devices

Added DSTORAGE_CUSTOM_DECOMPRESSION_FLAGS to report additional information about the custom decompression requests

this can be used to determine if the destination buffer is write-combined or not

Fixed calling conventions issue when building with x86

Improved documentation in header file

Updated NuGet package layout to be consistent with other native packages

General bug fixes

Click to expand...

Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/direc...age-sdk-1-0-2/

Brink · Oct 14, 2022

DirectStorage is coming to PC

Earlier this year, Microsoft showed the world how the Xbox Series X, with its portfolio of technology innovations, will introduce a new era of no-compromise gameplay. Alongside the actual console announcements, we unveiled the Xbox Velocity Architecture, a key part of how the Xbox Series X will deliver next generation gaming experiences.

We’re excited to bring DirectStorage, an API in the DirectX family originally designed for the Velocity Architecture to Windows PCs! DirectStorage will bring best-in-class IO tech to both PC and console just as DirectX 12 Ultimate does with rendering tech. With a DirectStorage capable PC and a DirectStorage enabled game, you can look forward to vastly reduced load times and virtual worlds that are more expansive and detailed than ever.

In this blog post, we’re going to give gaming enthusiasts more details on how it’s going to work and how it will revolutionize PC gaming.

The evolution of storage technologies and game IO patterns

Recent advancements in SSD and PCIe technologies, specifically NVMe technologies, allow gaming PCs to have storage solutions that deliver far more bandwidth than was ever possible with older hard drive technologies. Instead of tens of megabytes per second, drives like the upcoming Xbox Series X console’s custom NVMe can deliver a blazing-fast multiple gigabytes per second.

Game workloads have also evolved. Modern games load in much more data than older ones and are smarter about how they load this data. These data loading optimizations are necessary for this larger amount of data to fit into shared memory/GPU accessible memory. Instead of loading large chunks at a time with very few IO requests, games now break assets like textures down into smaller pieces, only loading in the pieces that are needed for the current scene being rendered. This approach is much more memory efficient and can deliver better looking scenes, though it does generate many more IO requests.

Unfortunately, current storage APIs were not optimized for this high number of IO requests, preventing them from scaling up to these higher NVMe bandwidths creating bottlenecks that limit what games can do. Even with super-fast PC hardware and an NVMe drive, games using the existing APIs will be unable to fully saturate the IO pipeline leaving precious bandwidth on the table.

That’s where DirectStorage for PC comes in. This API is the response to an evolving storage and IO landscape in PC gaming. DirectStorage will be supported on certain systems with NVMe drives and work to bring your gaming experience to the next level. If your system doesn’t support DirectStorage, don’t fret; games will continue to work just as well as they always have.

What exactly will DirectStorage do for my PC gaming experience and how?

There are two primary areas this new API is going to improve: reducing frustratingly long load times of the past and enabling games to be more detailed and expansive than ever.

Although seemingly different, both benefits stem from the same IO system advancements that DirectStorage brings. Whether it’s the textures of your characters clothing, or the details of the mountains off in the distance, both fundamentally involve the loading of data from a storage device which needs to eventually get to the GPU. The former just happens while on a loading screen whereas the latter happens as you walk through an open world game that loads in the distant scenery coming into view in real time while dumping things that drop out of view.

In either case, previous gen games had an asset streaming budget on the order of 50MB/s which even at smaller 64k block sizes (ie. one texture tile) amounts to only hundreds of IO requests per second. With multi-gigabyte a second capable NVMe drives, to take advantage of the full bandwidth, this quickly explodes to tens of thousands of IO requests a second. Taking the Series X’s 2.4GB/s capable drive and the same 64k block sizes as an example, that amounts to >35,000 IO requests per second to saturate it.

Existing APIs require the application to manage and handle each of these requests one at a time first by submitting the request, waiting for it to complete, and then handling its completion. The overhead of each request is not very large and wasn’t a choke point for older games running on slower hard drives, but multiplied tens of thousands of times per second, IO overhead can quickly become too expensive preventing games from being able to take advantage of the increased NVMe drive bandwidths.

On top of that, many of these assets are compressed. In order to be used by the CPU or GPU, they must first be decompressed. A game can pull as much data off the disk as it wants, but you still need an efficient way to decompress and get it to the GPU for rendering. By using DirectStorage, your games are able to leverage the best current and upcoming decompression technologies.

In a world where a game knows it needs to load and decompress thousands of blocks for the next frame, the one-at-a-time model results in loss of efficiency at various points in the data block’s journey. The DirectStorage API is architected in a way that takes all this into account and maximizes performance throughout the entire pipeline from NVMe drive all the way to the GPU.

It does this in several ways: by reducing per-request NVMe overhead, enabling batched many-at-a-time parallel IO requests which can be efficiently fed to the GPU, and giving games finer grain control over when they get notified of IO request completion instead of having to react to every tiny IO completion.

In this way, developers are given an extremely efficient way to submit/handle many orders of magnitude more IO requests than ever before ultimately minimizing the time you wait to get in game, and bringing you larger, more detailed virtual worlds that load in as fast as your game character can move through it.

Why NVMe?

NVMe devices are not only extremely high bandwidth SSD based devices, but they also have hardware data access pipes called NVMe queues which are particularly suited to gaming workloads. To get data off the drive, an OS submits a request to the drive and data is delivered to the app via these queues. An NVMe device can have multiple queues and each queue can contain many requests at a time. This is a perfect match to the parallel and batched nature of modern gaming workloads. The DirectStorage programming model essentially gives developers direct control over that highly optimized hardware.

In addition, existing storage APIs also incur a lot of ‘extra steps’ between an application making an IO request and the request being fulfilled by the storage device, resulting in unnecessary request overhead. These extra steps can be things like data transformations needed during certain parts of normal IO operation. However, these steps aren’t required for every IO request on every NVMe drive on every gaming machine. With a supported NVMe drive and properly configured gaming machine, DirectStorage will be able to detect up front that these extra steps are not required and skip all the necessary checks/operations making every IO request cheaper to fulfill.

For these reasons, NVMe is the storage technology of choice for DirectStorage and high-performance next generation gaming IO.

When can we expect more details?

For every DirectX family feature, Microsoft brings together the best of the PC gaming industry players to standardize new gaming features, make them available to game developers, and eventually get them into your gaming machines.
This process has already begun for DirectStorage and we’re working with our industry partners right now to finish designing/building the API and its supporting components. We’re targeting getting a development preview of DirectStorage into the hands of game developers next year.
Click to expand...

Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/direc...-coming-to-pc/

SerhiyIA · Oct 14, 2022

'System and compressed memory' on ASUS G75VY notebook load CPU always on 16%

thank you for your reply!

here what I did:

1. disabled non-microsoft services, disabled all applications in startup list

result: after restart "system and compressed memory" still gain 17% CPU

2. ran PC into safe mode ( just to see what happens )

result: CPU load is 0% for "system and compressed memory"

3. ran PC in normal mode

result: CPU load is 0% for "system and compressed memory"

as we can see from step 1, the problem probably is not in applications ?

what would you suggest in this case ?

looking forward for your answer

Windows 10: DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Compression improves game loading significantly

DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Compression improves game loading significantly

DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Compression improves game loading significantly

DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Compression improves game loading significantly

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