With the announcement of Windows 11, a new Direct Storage feature is available to help gamers play games with better worlds. Microsoft decided not to make it exclusive to Windows 11 and announced that DirectStorage would be in Windows 10, but everything was not so smooth. On Windows 10, DirectStorage will not fully work as the storage stack does not play well with the new API.
Windows 11 Direct Storage is a particular set of DirectX Libraries APIs taken from the Xbox X / S to redirect requests for graphics resources to the GPU. In other words, when a video card requests data using Direct Storage, the necessary compressed files from RAM go straight to the GPU. Working without Direct Storage, the video card requests data from RAM to the processor for unpacking and then goes to the video card. As a result, working with Direct Storage eliminates the extra circle and makes a good performance gain.
If you are a gamer, you probably know that when playing a game with a large open world, the game itself draws the textures and graphics of the world as the character progresses. The world shows great graphics in front of the character, but sometimes there are delays, and the world seems blurry. This also applies to the range of the world itself, wherein the distance between rocks or mountains is blurred, and the textures are not loaded. This is why Direct Storage came into being, which makes it possible to display the range quality of the game world better, rendering textures faster.
Requirements for Direct Storage in Windows 11
- You need an NVMe SSD with a minimum PCIe 3.0 interface but better than PCIe 4.0 to experience maximum performance. The NVMe volume must also be at least 1TB.
- You need a graphics card compatible with the DirectX 12 Ultimate specifications. This means graphics cards like Nvidia’s RTX 2000 and RTX 3000 and AMD’s line of RDNA 2.
- Game developers also need to implement the API for Direct Storage to work.
- The operating system must be Windows 11.
- Any manual activation on your part is not required since all this will be determined automatically.
