It’s time to benchmark DirectStorage – Here’s how

Here’s an easy way to benchmark DirectStorage on your PC

DirectStorage has the potential to transform PC games, offering gamers faster loading times while giving developers full access to the potential of modern storage mediums. With DirectStorage game assets can be loaded in exceptionally quickly, allowing developers to push past the asset decompression bottlenecks that have limited what developers can do within their games.

Thanks to “winjer” over on NeoGAF, a pre-compiled version of Microsoft’s BulkLoadDemo DirectStorage 1.2 test is now available to download, allowing gamers to showcase the capabilities of their systems when DirectStorage is utilised. With DirectStorage 1.2, GPU Decompression is available, allowing asset decompression to be moved from the realm of the CPU and directly onto your graphics cards. This can hugely accelerate these workloads, enabling insane levels of storage performance with the latest SSDs.

Later this month, PC gamers will be able to play their first game with DirectStorage 1.2 support with Insomniac Games’ Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, a game that features support for GPU decompression. We plan to test this game when it launches on July 26th, though this game is unlikely to have any integrated benchmarking tools to showcase DirectStorage. 

winjer’s pre-compiled version of Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.2 Bulk Load Demo is available to download here. If you want to compile the tool yourself, you can head over to the tool’s GitHub page here.

You can join the discussion on DirectStorage 1.2 Benchmarking on the OC3D Forums.