Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.2 Is Now Available

Microsoft has announced the release of the 1.2 version of the DirectStorage SDK which brings new features and fixes based on user feedback.

What is DirectStorage

DirectStorage is a technology included in the DirectX dev kit which is designed to help games load faster. Faster loading times are achieved by moving the decompression load from the CPU to the GPU which in turn speeds up the process by placing the files on the GPU right as they are decompressed so they are ready to be used much more quickly than when they are on decompressed on the CPU.

DirectStorage 1.2

With the release of DirectStorage 1.2 Microsoft has taken into account the user feedback to apply new features and fixes considerably improving the DirectStorage SDK, One of these new features is the introduction of Force Buffered IO. Currently, DirectStorage opens files in an unbuffered mode which allows the tool to avoid unnecessary copies and gets the data onto the GPU as quickly as possible. Microsoft has decided to instead use buffered mode as developers would like to use the same code on SSD’s as well as Hard drives as the latter requires buffered IO.

The next major addition is the new GetCompressionSupport API as currently, DirectStorage chooses the decompression path for built-in compression formats based on the GPU capabilities but developers have mentioned that it would be beneficial to understand which decompression path is being used. They claim that this is so that default texture resolution settings can be set based on the chosen decompression path.

Bug Fixes:

• Resolved https://github.com/microsoft/DirectStorage/issues/22 by adding a “Reserved1” field to DSTORAGE_REQUEST_OPTIONS.  This makes the in-memory layout of the structure more explicit but doesn’t actually change the layout from previous versions. 
• Fixed DSTORAGE_REQUEST_DESTINATION_TEXTURE_REGION for 3D textures, as reported to us on the DirectX Discord channel. 
• Fixed scheduling issue that manifested when transferring uncompressed data from memory to buffers 

Performance improvements: 

• Moved the copy after GPU decompression onto the compute queue for GPUs on which this is faster. 

Where Can I Learn More?

If you would like to learn more about DirectStorage 1.2, you can view the full blog post here.