Solid state drives with different PCIe interfaces tend to offer very different performance times in typical applications under heavy workloads due to bandwidth constraints. However, according to the load times from the built-in Forspoken benchmark, DirectStorage doesn’t seem to make much of a difference between PCIe Gen3 and PCIe Gen5 drives. Compusumble.
There are two main advantages that Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.1 application programming interface brings to games. Faster load times facilitated by asset compression/decompression algorithms processed by SSD controllers and GPUs. It also reduces CPU load when handling NVMe requests, resulting in faster and more efficient transfers of assets from storage to the graphics subsystem.
We already know that DirectStorage can greatly reduce the data transfer speed of solid state drives, even SSDs with a SATA interface. This reduces load times and also raises the question of whether SSDs with different interfaces will provide different experiences in DirectStorage enabled games. As it turns out, it’s not.
Forspoken’s load times are significantly reduced, so even the built-in benchmark combined load times for 7 different levels/scenes compared to the advanced Phison E26 based SSD (the controller that powers the best SSD this season). ) is negligible 3 seconds with PCIe Gen5 x4 interface and mature Adata XPG SX8200 Pro with PCIe Gen3 x4 interface.
On paper, this means that PCIe Gen3 drives are 32% slower than PCIe Gen5 SSDs, but in practice the difference isn’t noticeable in 7 scenes. The throughput of the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface is approximately four times that of the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. So DirectStorage compression not only works, it blurs the lines between different SSDs.
Of course, there’s only one game that currently supports Microsoft DirectStorage, so it makes sense to get a PCIe Gen5 x4 drive for newer builds. But the good news is that as DirectStorage gains traction, SSDs will likely perform on par with next-gen drives in gaming.
