DirectStorage is a feature intended to allow games to make full use of high-speed storage (such as NVMe SSDs) that can can deliver multiple gigabytes a second of small (eg 64kb) data reads with minimal CPU overhead. Although it is possible to saturate a drive using traditional ReadFile-based IO the CPU overhead of increases non-linearly as the size of individual reads decreases. Additionally, most games choose to store their assets compressed on disk in order to reduce the install footprint, with these assets being decompressed on the fly as load time. The CPU overhead of this becomes increasingly expensive as bandwidth increases.
Video game consoles such as the XBox Series X|S address these issues by offloading aspects of this to hardware - making use of the NVMe hardware queue to manage IO and hardware accelerated decompression. As we expect to see more titles designed to take advantage of the possibilities offered by this architecture it becomes important that Windows has similar capabilities.
The DirectStorage API already exists on Xbox and in order to ease porting of titles between Xbox and Windows, the two APIs are as similar as possible.
DirectStorage only supports read operations.
You can find some good starting information in Developer Guidance
We invite you to join us at our discord server. See the related links section for our full list of Direct3D 12 and DirectStorage-related links.
The Samples directory contains sample code that demonstrates how to use the DirectStorage APIs.
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HelloDirectStorage: This rudimentary sample serves to provide a quick and easy way to get acquainted with the DirectStorage runtime by reading the contents of a file and writing them out to a buffer on the GPU using DirectStorage.
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BulkLoadDemo: This demonstrates using DirectStorage, GPU decompression and custom CPU decompression.
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GpuDecompressionBenchmark: This sample provides a quick way to see the DirectStorage runtime decompression performance by reading the contents of a file, compressing it and then decompressing multiple ways while measuring the bandwidth and CPU usage. Decompression is performed using the GPU as well as the CPU for comparison.
This directory contains codec source and sample code that demonstrates how to use GDeflate.
The repo uses submodules, so be sure to pass --recurse-submodules to the git clone command.
If you forget to do this then you can run git submodule update --init
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Install Visual Studio 2019 or higher.
Open the following Visual Studio solutions and build
Samples\HelloDirectStorage\HelloDirectStorage.sln
Samples\BulkLoadDemo\BulkLoadDemo.sln
Samples\GpuDecompressionBenchmark\GpuDecompressionBenchmark.sln