DirectStorage lightens the CPU by 40% on Windows 11

The benefits DirectStorage will bring to storage performance will allow developers to take advantage of more CPU resources in games. The new API developed by Microsoft makes it possible (according to company data) to reduce the CPU load on Windows 11 by as much as 40%, freeing up resources to devote to other activities. The impact on games would be very positive, especially on open worlds populated by many and varied non-player characters.

We have already experienced something similar with the Velocity architecture used on the Xbox X | S Series. With DirectStorage, however, the performance increase is more pronounced, thanks to the higher speeds of the NVMe SSDs and the greater optimizations with the file I / O stack on Windows 11. Interestingly, DirectStorage still manages to relieve the CPU by 40%, albeit continuing to use it for decompression operations.

DirectStorage The engineer of Microsoft Cooper Partin also points out that DirectStorage was developed specifically to get the maximum performance on PC, being different from the Xbox version.

“DirectStorage on Windows is not a direct port of the version on Xbox. This is a new implementation and we have adapted it to get the most out of PC platforms. "

" DirectStorage is designed for modern gaming systems. It can handle small reads more efficiently and multiple requests can be grouped together. If the technology is fully supported by a title, it can reduce the CPU load by 20-40%. This is possible thanks to advances in the file I / O stack on Windows 11 and improvements on the platform in general. "


“On Windows 10, DirectStorage will use an optimized I / O layer that we made on Win32 api. This allows you to take advantage of good models such as asynchronous I / O and will ensure that you can extract the maximum performance obtainable with Windows 10. "

" The main goal of Direct Storage is to use the best way to manage loading requests based on the platform you are playing on. It is no longer important now if a title runs on Windows 10 or Windows 11, it just works with the API and we do the rest. ”

Specify the engineer.