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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MiniEngine (with DirectStorage support): The miniengine ModelViewer sample (original sample here) has been updated to use DirectStorage for Windows to load its assets and demonstrates how to decompress assets with your existing CPU decompression codecs.
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Install Visual Studio 2019 or higher.
Open the following Visual Studio solutions and build
Samples\HelloDirectStorage.sln
Samples\MiniEngine\ModelViewer\ModelViewer.sln