Diablo IV Data Mining Discovers DirectStorage SSD Support For Hella-Fast Load Times
A good example of this tech operating in the real world is in the game Forespoken - which is the only title that supports DirectStorage at this time. According to a review by Digital Foundry, loading times in Forespoken are reduced by up to 25% with DirectStorage enabled on a Core i9-13900K paired to a 3.5GB/s NVMe SSD. But this is with a high-end CPU; with a much slower CPU, the gains can be far greater with DirectStorage. A Ryzen 5 3600 CPU with the same drive was also tested by Digital Foundry and was effectively twice as fast compared to DirectStorage being turned off. A load difference from 6.77 seconds to 11.73 seconds respectively.
Sadly, the game does not feature on-the-fly data decompression and only supports decompression when starting a new game or loading a save. But as previously mentioned, the benefits of both could be great in Diablo 4. The developers behind Diablo 4 have not said anything about DirectStorage support, so we don’t know how long it will take before DirectStorage is implemented into the game. But at least we know the feature is being worked on right now.