Intel Arc A770, RX 7900 XT And RTX 4080 DirectStorage Battle Ends In A Surprise Victory
The German site tested DirectStorage across high-end graphics cards from AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel using both PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 SSDs as well as a drive connected to SATA. The system in question was a Core i9-12900K desktop machine, and they tested it under Windows 11, which Microsoft says is the optimal environment for DirectStorage.
This video also has a pre-built download for the benchmark in the comments.
This saves tremendously on bandwidth across the PCIe bus, and it also drastically reduces CPU usage. You can see the effects of GPU decompression on CPU usage in the video above, which compares CPU and GPU decompression on an SSD as well as on an HDD. As expected, it makes almost no difference on the HDD, but check out the CPU usage difference with the SSD.
The results from the benchmarks are fairly consistent overall: CPU decompression is the slowest, but it barely matters with the SATA drive, where the GeForce and the Radeon aren't any faster. When using NVMe SSDs, however, the CPU deflate rate is capped by the speed at which the CPU can decompress the data, where GPUs see a small but significant uplift when moving from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0.
DirectStorage is likely to become a major component of PC gaming starting this year. As titles begin to become targeted specifically for current-generation game consoles with fast solid-state storage, a PCIe SSD for your game library is likely to become non-negotiable.
