Windows 10: How to find out if your Windows PC supports DirectStorage

GHacks · Apr 21, 2023

DirectStorage is a relatively new technology to improve game loading times on supported devices. Microsoft's Windows 11 operating system supports DirectStorage, and support has also been added to Windows 10.

Microsoft has pushed out several versions of the DirectStorage API already, which developers may use in their games to benefit from the feature.

Many Windows gamers may be unaware of the technology. The two main reasons for that are that only one game has been released so far that supports DirectStorage and that DirectStorage benefits from very fast NVME drives. The one game is Forspoken, which has received mixed reviews so far.

DirectStorage requires a PCIe 3.0 NVME SSD and a graphics processing unit (GPU) that supports DirectX 12. Microsoft has noted previously that a GPU that supports DirectX 12 Ultimate is ideal for the feature.

Previously, DirectStorage required at least a 1 terabyte NVME hard drive, but Microsoft has removed the requirement from the official specifications.

Find out if DirectStorage is supported

It is actually quite easy to check if a Windows PC supports DirectStorage. Here are step-by-step instructions to do so:

Use the keyboard shortcut Windows-G to open the Game Bar on the operating system; this opens an overlay on the desktop with all sorts of system information and tools related to gaming.

Select the Settings icon, which is the cogwheel icon on the center toolbar at the top.

Switch to Gaming Features when the Settings widget is displayed on the screen.

Check the DirectStorage entries there to find out of DirectStorage is supported, and to what degree.

Windows provides the following details:

Whether the GPU supports DirectStorage.

Whether the operating system supports the latest DirectStorage IO optimizations.

Whether any of the connected drives supports the feature.

The information is useful, as you may use it to select the best drive for the installation of games. The faster the drive the better the performance in games that make use of the feature.

Windows includes no option to turn on DirectStorage. The Windows PC either supports the feature, because it meets the requirements, or it does not support it. Games do need to support it as well, but there is only one that has been released that does support it.

Games that are in development currently may introduce support, and some future games will certainly support DirectStorage. It is unclear at this stage, whether DirectStorage will remain a niche feature, supported only by a small number of games, or enter mainstream. The latter won't happen overnight, but will take years.

Now You: what is your take on DirectStorage?

Thank you for being a Ghacks reader. The post How to find out if your Windows PC supports DirectStorage appeared first on gHacks Technology News.

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Brink · Apr 21, 2023

DirectStorage 1.1 Coming Soon

When we shared our first public release of DirectStorage on Windows to reduce CPU overhead and increase IO throughput, we also shared that GPU decompression was next on our roadmap. We are now in the final stretch of development and plan to release DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Decompression to developers by the end of 2022. This is one of our most highly requested features, so in the meantime, we want to share a sneak peek at what we’ve been up to and what developers can look forward to later this year!

For Gamers:

What is asset compression and how does GPU decompression change games?

Games require massive amounts of data to build immersive worlds – every character, object, and landscape has “assets” describing characteristics like shape, lighting, and color. This adds up to hundreds of gigabytes of data. To reduce the overall package size of a game, these assets are compressed. When a game is run, the assets are transferred to system memory, where the CPU decompresses the data before it is finally copied into GPU memory to be used as needed. The transfer and decompression of these assets on gaming devices contributes heavily to load times and limits how much detail can be included in open world scenes.

DirectStorage 1.0 improves the data transfer part of this process. Advances in Windows 11 combined with DirectStorage allow developers to make use of the higher bandwidth of NVMe drives. DirectStorage enabled games installed on NVMe drives should expect to see reductions in load times by up to 40%. After enhancing this part of the pipeline, developers will want to improve decompression performance next.

Typically, decompression work is done on the CPU because compression formats have historically been optimized for CPUs only. We are offering an alternative method in DirectStorage 1.1 by moving the decompression of those assets to the GPU instead – known as “GPU decompression.” Graphics cards are extremely efficient at performing repeatable tasks in parallel, and we can utilize that capability along with the bandwidth of a high-speed NVMe drive to do more work at once. As a result, the amount of time it takes for an asset to load decreases, reducing level load times and improving open world streaming.

To get a more tangible sense for the possibilities, we built a highly optimized sample (below). It shows that when DirectStorage is running with GPU decompression vs CPU decompression, scenes are loading nearly 3x faster and the CPU is almost entirely freed up to be used for other game processes. When DirectStorage 1.1 released, it kicks off a new journey for game developers to make full use of gaming hardware and speed up load times for PC games over the next few years.

GPU with GDeflate (left) loading in 0.8 seconds vs CPU with Zlib (right) in 2.36 seconds.
This is an early preview of the sample; performance numbers vary with different workloads/hardware.

Where does GPU decompression work?

Several factors affect game performance when it comes to compression/decompression. Here’s a breakdown of what works and what’s recommended:

OS: DirectStorage games will work on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, but there are additional optimizations in the IO stack available to Windows 11 users, so that is our recommended choice for the best improvements. Games running on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 will see gains from an efficient GPU decompression implementation, as the key component to this feature is moving the workload from the CPU to the GPU rather than changes to the OS itself.

Storage Device: DirectStorage enabled games will work on all devices (. You’ll need an NVMe SSD, where the bandwidth capabilities are much higher and the storage media itself is faster, to see the significant improvements of DirectStorage. We highly recommend ensuring your game files are saved to an NVMe to get the best gaming experience.

GPU: Any DirectX 12 capable GPU that supports Shader Model 6.0 will be able to take advantage of the new feature, we recommend a DX12 Ultimate capable card.

For Developers:

Introducing GDeflate in DirectStorage

There are a wide variety of compression formats available – developers choose among these by considering the compression ratio and runtime performance of the codec. With DirectStorage 1.1, we present a new compression format, contributed by NVIDIA, called GDeflate.

“NVIDIA and Microsoft are working together to make long load times in PC games a thing of the past,” said John Spitzer, VP of Developer and Performance Technology at NVIDIA. “Applications will benefit by applying GDeflate compression to their game assets, enabling richer content and shorter loading times without having to increase the file download size.”

GDeflate is a novel lossless data compression standard optimized for high-throughput decompression on the GPU with deflate-like compression ratios. GDeflate saves CPU cycles by offloading costly decompression operations to the GPU, while saving system interconnect bandwidth and on-disk footprint at the same time. GDeflate compression is inherently data-parallel, which enables greater scalability across a wide range of GPU architectures. It is designed to provide significant bandwidth amplification when loading from the fastest NVMe devices, supporting both bulk-loading and fine-grained streaming scenarios.

GDeflate provides a new GPU decompression format that all hardware vendors can support and optimize for. Microsoft is working with key partners like AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA to provide drivers tailored for this format. “Intel is excited to release drivers co-engineered with Microsoft to work seamlessly with the DirectStorage Runtime to bring optimized GPU decompression capabilities to game developers!” said Murali Ramadoss, Intel Fellow and GM of GPU Software Architecture. Like all DirectX technologies, with DirectStorage, Microsoft is working to ensure that gamers have great options for compatibility and performance for their hardware.

What’s coming with DirectStorage 1.1?

When released, we will provide an update to the DirectStorage SDK that provides everything developers need to get started with GPU decompression. Included with the SDK will be:

Updated DirectStorage runtime to perform decompression

Tooling for GDeflate, including compressors

Samples (including the Bulk Loading demo above)

Documentation

Hardware vendors may begin releasing drivers for DirectStorage 1.1 in the weeks before our release. Drivers from our key partners ensure that developers will see the full potential of GPU decompression. “DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU decompression will enable developers to unleash their creativity, delivering more detailed and visually stunning worlds,” said Scott Herkelman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit at AMD. “We have worked closely with Microsoft to ensure the best possible experience on AMD devices and platforms.”

If these drivers are not present, DirectStorage will fall back to an optimized DirectCompute implementation. Developers who plan to experiment with the next version of DirectStorage should keep an eye out for new and improved drivers.

Soon after the SDK release, we will publish Apache 2.0 licensed reference implementations of GDeflate compressors and decompressors, allowing tooling to be integrated with existing asset pipelines.

With a new compression format, tooling, and drivers in hand, developers will have the key ingredients to architect their engines to take advantage of GPU decompression.

Next Steps

We will be providing more API specifics and documentation with the release coming soon, here are a few ways developers can start planning now:

Refresh your memory on how your IO stack is currently working in your game engine’s architecture. Consider how your tooling pipeline may need to be adjusted.

Try out DirectStorage 1.0.

GPU decompression only works with requests that target GPU resources, so start utilizing:

DSTORAGE_REQUEST_DESTINATION_BUFFER

DSTORAGE_REQUEST_DESTINATION_TEXTURE_REGION

DSTORAGE_REQUEST_DESTINATION_MULTIPLE_SUBRESOURCES

DSTORAGE_REQUEST_DESTINATION_TILES

Set aside some R&D time after the release for understanding and experimenting with GPU decompression.

Stay tuned to the blog and our Discord channel for more news and we look forward getting DirectStorage 1.1 into developers’ hands so they can start integrating it with future games!
Click to expand...

Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/direc...1-coming-soon/

Brink · Apr 21, 2023

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/

Brink · Apr 21, 2023

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/

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