DirectStorage does increase FPS in gaming, the better the SSD, the more gain

Microsoft DirectStorage was the technology that was going to revolutionize loading times in video games or at least, that’s how we were led to believe it would be. However, the first game to use DirectStorage, Forspoken, showed little improvement in load times. Instead, the new evidence of Forspoken with DirectStorage show different results, since the PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 SSDs are much faster than SATA and also achieve better performance, achieving increase FPS.

Forspoken was the first game to debut with the long-awaited Microsoft DirectStorage technology. If you don’t know it, in short, its objective is reduce loading times and in its newer versions, reduce CPU usage. All this is thanks to the fact that it includes the GPU decompression, leaving this job that used to be done by the processor to the graphics card. Thus, under the tests that were carried out, a 85% reduction in CPU usagewhich would imply remove the bottleneck. However, we didn’t see much improvement in load times or in Forspoken’s performance with SSD and DirectStorage in its first tests.

This is how the different SSDs perform in Forspoken with DirectStorage

We are back again with the only video game that uses DirectStorage technology and therefore, it becomes an interesting test subject for SSDs. This time the tests were performed on a PC equipped with a i9-13900Ka graphics card NVIDIA RTX 4090, 32GB by heart ddr5 and a power supply Seasonic Prime TX 1300. As for the game, Forspoken was set with Ultra graphicsresolution 4K and Ray Tracing Enabled. Taking this into account, the tests begin and the comparison of all types of ssdincluding NVMe PCIe 4.0 and 3.0, USB 3.2, SATA and could not miss a HDD traditional.

Going on to see the comparisons of all the scenes choosing the one that takes the longest to load, we see that the SSDs NVMe PCIe 4.0/3.0 take between 2.25 and 2.5 seconds. Instead, the NVMe SSD via USB 3.2 it takes twice as long with 5.4 seconds and the SATA SSD triple with some 7.5 seconds. Lastly, the SATA HDD it takes almost 50 seconds. If we now turn to the average of results, we have that the SSDs PCIe 4.0 are late 1.3 seconds approximately.

With PCIe 3.0 the time increases slightly in 1.86 secondswhile with USB 3.2 it goes up to 4.2 seconds. Finally, SATA SSDs take about 5.8 secondsso you really do notice the differences.

PCIe 4.0 SSDs get more FPS than PCIe 3.0 and SATA

While Microsoft DirectStorage technology was focused on reducing load times, as we said earlier, with the latest version it was also looking improve gaming performance. Well, apparently this is also true, since according to the tests the NVMe Gen 4 SSDs achieve increase average and minimum FPS. As we can see in the fastest SSDs that work through PCIe 4.0 they manage to achieve 84 FPS on average and 66 FPS minimum in Forspoken with DirectStorage. On the other hand, if we go down to the SSD via USB 3.2 we go down to 80 FPS on average and 63 minimum.

Another step below we find it with the Crucial P2 which is a PCIe 3.0 SSDwhich is left with 79 FPS on average and 61 minimum. Finally, we see that the SATA SSD drop in the worst case to 79 FPS on average and 59 minimum and the HDDs another small drop to 57 FPS at 1% Lows. Although they do not seem to be too high figures, between the worst SATA SSD and the best NVMe SSD there is a 6% improvement in average FPS and 12% in minimums.