Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.1 arrives this week and the biggest and newest addition is GPU decompression for Windows PC games, boosting PC game load times significantly.
Brands such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all getting behind Microsoft’s DirectStorage with brand new drivers, and will all simply be awaiting for games to arrive for it. With GPU compression offloading the work needed to decompress assets in games to the graphics card instead of the CPU, the gamer experience will vastly improve.
“Typically, decompression work is done on the CPU because compression formats have historically been optimized for CPUs only,” senior program manager at Microsoft Cassie Hoef explains via the official company blog. “We are offering an alternative method in DirectStorage 1.1 by moving the decompression of those assets to the GPU instead — known as GPU decompression.”
Developers will now need to tweak their games to make use of DirectStorage 1.1, a wide spread improvement for the entire gaming landscape.
