At GDC 2022, the Forspoken developer showed off a video of the game’s loading time, which takes advantage of Microsoft’s DirectStorage technology. The gain is substantial.
One of the marketing arguments of the PS5 and the Xbox Series when the new generation came out, it was the reduced loading time. If the idea is that there is no more waiting to launch your game (in fact, you still have to wait a few seconds on the first launch at least), it must be said that everything has been greatly reduced with SSDs and technologies of the 2020s.
And soon even shorter on PC? It is possible according to Luminous Productions, developer of Forspoken. During the Game Developers Conference 2022, Teppei Ono indicated that scenes from the game will load in “1 second” on computers. Provided of course you have the necessary gear: M.2 NVMe SSD.
The game will support the DirectStorage, new Windows function from Microsoft to speed up this loading. In a scene presented at the GDC, Luminous made the comparison between an NVMe SSD, a SATA SSD and a standard HDD, all under DirectStorage. The delay increased from 1.9 to 21.5 seconds.
In the future, explains Ono, games will undoubtedly all benefit from Windows technologies on PC, coupled with the increase in the number of computers with SSD (HDDs don’t specifically take advantage of DirectStorage, “due to hardware limitations”). Note that your NVMe must be running at a minimum of 5000MB/s to hope for a 1 second load in “certain scenes of Forspoken“.
Source: www.theverge.com
