Well, it seems like the developers of Forspoken spoke too soon about its release date. Forspoken has been delayed to January, which means we're waiting longer to see DirectStorage in action on Windows 11 PCs.
DirectStorage is Microsoft's name for the Windows version of the software interface it uses to rapidly transfer data on Xbox Series S/X consoles, and it's supposed to dramatically decrease loading times for Windows games running off an NVMe SSD. Forspoken was the first game to show the benefits of DirectStorage publicly running on Windows 11.
Developer Luminous Productions says that DirectStorage is hitting throughputs of 5,000MB/s and higher on NVMe M.2 SSDs, with PCIe 4.0 drives being able to reach as high as 7,000MB/s. This reduces load times for Forspoken from an average of 10 seconds to just one second. If you're thinking about upgrading, there will most certainly be some NVMe SSD's on sale this Amazon Prime Day.
DirectStorage makes NVMe SSDs faster and more efficient by allowing multiple I/O operations concurrently. According to Microsoft, it also reduces CPU overhead by 20 to 40% on Windows 11. A future update will unburden the CPU even further, Microsoft says.
DirectStorage has been available for developers since March, but Forspoken is the first game we know of that supports it. Now that it's been pushed back, it's unclear if we'll see DirectStorage in any PC games this year.
In the meantime, you can see if your PC is DirectStorage-ready by registering here, and downloading the Xbox Insider Hub from the Windows Store.
