That's what i came here to say as well. There's no data frame of reference to tell us if DirectStorage if better or not, which i think is what most people want to know.
DS1.1 works on all storage so in a round about way it is compared. The scene load times are about the same here as they are in most games with a similar drive.(Hence it's about the drive not the API) The conclusion for this video is if you are still "GAMING" on a HDD it is time to get an NVMe drive. If you are on a SATA SSD and your load times VS NVMe can be reasonably measured in milliseconds then it is likely good enough. This is the only game that uses DS1.1 right now and it is far from optimized. Until we see the DS API implemented in a game without a broken back this is all conjecture. Anyway it's all about what we ourselves can palette not our neighbor.
@@ncohafmuta digital foundry tested DS off, it's a big difference even to framerate - turning direct storage off cuts framerate in Forspoken in half. Since direct storage works with all storage drives it even benefits old HDD, there is no reason the gamer should disable it especially not as it destroys the game's performance
Pretty sure it's not something you can just toggle on and off. DirectStorage sends the data, direct from storage, to its designated work area, rather than send everything to the cpu to let the cpu sort it out. It probably wouldn't be able to run through the traditional pipeline without modification to tell the cpu how to sort it.
SATA SSD will still be useful for years to come, you can't beat the cost benefit of having a large SSD for all your games. And it runs insanely cooler than a NVMe under heavy load.
Also keep in mind that speeds in HDD may vary depending in the phisical location of the files on the discs, while an SSD should have basically the same speeds everywhere.
Many of the low end ones don't follow that rule in that they have some fast flash and some slow flash and rely on a host side buffer since they don't have any RAM on board. Low end SSDs can be really inconsistent in both time and space on the disk.
Hybrid HDD are pretty quick, and you can partician or stroke your hdd, the first 10-30% of a hdd is faster than the outer edges. I have all 4, m.2, ssd, shdd, and hdd for storage.
This needed to be a test with and without DirectStorage to make sense, as this just shows a faster drive gives lower load times. (And no counter examples showing several non-DirectStorage games not being able to scale linearly.) I see the game supports Win10, wouldn't that be a good way to show if DirectStorage does anything significant?
The result look to me like the demise of SATA SSD storage is greatly exaggerated: going from 3-6s load times to 1-3s isn't a big deal. HDDs on the other hand have mostly outlived their usefulness for most things besides archival. I still have my lesser played Steam games on a 1TB WD Black HDD.
I have 2x 2TB Seagate 7200 drives and i one for photos, videos etc the other for games back up but really old games that load fast in a HDD I use as well. Demanding games ssds all the way
I have 3 WD Caviar Black 1TB drivers that have been in like 3 builds now, those things are indestructible. They have to be pushing 15 years now and still going strong.
It's basically a tech demo at this point as no one is going to make a game that REQUIRES direct storage on the PC side as the installed market is too small. If there's a killer app that NEEDS direct storage to work then it will take off, otherwise it is just an incremental improvement on load times. The change from a good HDD to a good SSD was revolutionary. The change from a good SSD to a GREAT SSD is often not something you notice (unless it's a DRAMless SSD....)
I'm still currently running my indie games off a 1TB WD VelociRaptor 10,000RPM HDD (The only HDD I still have in my system). My OS is installed on an PCIe 4.0 Optane P5800X. My modern games are installed across a 2TB WD Black SN850 NVMe Gen4 drive and a 4TB WD Blue SATA SSD.
You know, tech reviewers are always announcing the "end" of some technology or some technology "killer". The problem is that often it doesn't happen or if it does happen it's years away so it's hard to take statements like this at all seriously.
I'm missing the DirectStorage on vs off times. If you have a faster SSD, the load times are shorter, yes. But how much do they get shorter by DirectStorage and how much by faster storage?
@@Centrioless My question is if this really is 1s vs 4s. I'm on Windows 10 so, i'm not getting DirectStorage anytime soon. What if it's 1s vs 1.5s? That would be far from a compelling reason to update to Windows 11. And then there's the question of optimisation. If DirectStorage comes with a library with optimised code, that runs on the gpu, and DirectStorage off is whatever the developers programmed, it would be an unfair comparison. Imagine, loading the data 1st, then decompress it, then transfer to the gpu, vs loading the data, while loading begin decompressing, and while decompressing begin transferring. There are huge gains to be had with optimised software. An example for that is Horizon Zero Dawn vs Forbidden West on a ps4 pro with a ssd. Horizon Forbidden West loads much faster, the more complex and better looking game, on the same hardware. My conspiracy theory is that they implemented the DirectStorage technology on the ps5, the performance was disappointing, then they optimised the game in general, and most of the benefit in loading times from Horizon 1 on ps4 vs Horizon 2 on ps5 comes from general software optimisation and the fast ssd, in equal parts, and dead last the DirectStorage technology.
I'm genuinely confused with these results as the rule of thumb "HDDs being an order of magnitude slower that SSDs, SATA being 2x slower than NVME and gen3 being 2x slower than gen4" is pretty much the only thing we can see here. Direct storage or not, having a faster drive DOES speed loading times up. Where's the expected benefit of direct storage then ? According to both theoretical explanations, and a benchmark from LTT, loading times should be 4x faster from DirectStorage alone, making compatible nvme drives at the very least 8x faster than non-DirectStorage SATA ones. That's not at all what we see here... With your charts alone and no additional ON/OFF comparison, the only 2 things we could conclude are HDDs are slow (we already knew that) and DirectStorage doesn't seem to do anything to improve loading times.
Haven't seen the LTT video(yet), but I think these Forspoken benchmarks really show the potential of Direct Storage. Obviously in most modern games you will see a pretty substantial difference between load times on a HDD and almost any SSD(SATA or NVMe). However, what you won't really see is much of difference between a SATA SSD and a NVMe SSD. Technically, even a Gen 3 NVMe can be like 6 or 7 times faster than a SATA SSD(in synthetic benchmarks) but you don't really see hardly any difference at all in the vast majority of games. While the difference here isn't quite that dramatic, it is certainly noticeable. And Gen 4 drives are even faster, but also have a price premium attached(you can find pretty good Gen 3 drives for similar prices conpared to the same size SATA SSD, but Gen 4 drives always cost more. Sometimes a lot more). You mention HDDs being an order of magnitude slower than a SATA SSD, but it depends on what you are measuring. A modern SATA 3 SSD tops out at around 550 MB/s in sequential read speeds where HDDS vary greatly depending on the amount of storage(total storage versus number of platters so how densely is the data packed on each platter) and RPMs(slower spinning 5400 RPM drives versus faster 7200 RPM drives or even more enterprise themed drives with 10,000 RPM or 15,000 RPM speeds). A decent capacity 5400 RPM drive can get well over 100 MB/s sequential reads and a 7200 RPM drive can get over 200 MB/s. The real difference lies in random reads. The hard drive has an average seek time(lets say around 4ms as that's pretty standard). That means you are averaging only around say 250 random reads (more or less) per second(with very small bits of data. The read/write head will stick around an area of disk longer when reading a larger amount of sequential data, assuming it isn't heavily fragmented). Since an SSD has no moving parts, it's only limited internally by the number of data pathways available(governed by the flash memory chips themselves and the controller). Even slower SATA SSDs can have tens of thousands of iops, making them a few orders of magnitude faster when it comes to random reads(An SSD might drop into the tens of MB/s range with extreme random reads, where a HDD might drop to a few hundred KB/s in the same extreme test). Faster NVMe drives can have over 100k iops or even over 1M for the newest, fastest drives. What we see when loading game assets is likely a mix of random reads(jumping around to load certain things into a scene) and sequential(many of those assets are relatively large).
Basically so pop-in of assets in game just isn't a thing anymore and higher resolution assets can be used without affecting frame rate. Load times are just a part of it, it is more about getting data to the GPU as efficiently as possible and not being slowed down by CPU and system RAM.
Is there any way to test on the MSI drive and have Direct storage turned off so we can get an idea of what difference is between direct storage and not with all other things being equal
@@rdspam and comparing it to HDD is laughable, seems like a cheap advertising move when on the CES presentation you see "2500% speedup*" then in small print "* compared to decade old tech".
Unfortunately due to high prices it's still hard to get any kind of high capacity ssds, some ppl still make use if hdds, so no sata ssds are going nowhere any time soon.
I think that Square didn't do any of the old tricks that game devs did with HDDs back in the day, A lot of times they would put in assets multiple times in the files so the spinning of the drive wouldn't have to seek randomly which can take much longer. As opposed to SSDs which are pretty king at it with no moving parts. I certainly don't blame Square, since even consoles are fully SSDs now, but yeah. I think that means that SATA SSDs are going to be fine for years to come as well, but if the cost is the same and you have an M.2 PCIe slot, I'd say its more important than ever to go PCIe M.2 when building now.
@@raylopez99 No. Any modern SSD(NVMe or even SATA) will provide a noticeable difference in everyday computing tasks compared to a HDD. IDK about basic desktops designed for office use, but pretty much all laptops and at least gaming class desktops ship with SSDs for a reason. People use their PCs for more than just gaming(doesn't have to be super intensive stuff, even basic web browsing and video streaming) and having any kind of fairly modern SSD versus a HDD makes a big difference in day to day use. And a lot of people do game on their PC. Avocado Mark aside, Forspoken is a real game and only the first to implement Direct Storage. That first scene in the benchmark(from what I've seen in videos of the game) only represents the very first part of the game with possibly quite a lot of cut scenes and perhaps relatively little interactive game play for the player. All the other scenes are the meat of the game. And it is here we see a massive difference between a hard drive(30 second load time minimum, sometimes closer to 45 seconds) versus even a SATA SSD(under 10 seconds). And if you can both find an NVMe drive of the same capacity for about the same price as a SATA SSD and have an available NVMe slot on your motherboard, it really is a no brainer to get the NVMe drive(load times get cut in about half again from well under 10 seconds to well under 5 seconds). And that's just an older, slower, lower capacity Gen 3 drive. You can find faster, higher capacity Gen 3 drives for relatively cheap. Maybe not so much for Gen 4 or 5 drives, though.
Hard drives are still viable options for storing things like documents and pictures. However, even without direct storage, I won't install games on HDD's anymore. I have 2 NVMe's and 2 SATA SSD's that I run my games from. Pricing on M.2 and SATA SSD's are finally really close to what HDD's have been, so there's no reason to pick up a couple.
I'll probably wait for more implementation before upgrading my Sata SSD to an NVME The experience is fine for gaming ex: 2 seconds vs 8 seconds is 400% diff in stats but in reality just a sip of water Also i mainly game in VR I'm wondering how much Direct Storage would help there I'm honestly very surprised and happy with my satas VR load performance
SATA SSDs are still good for gaming load times IMO for people on a strict budget. If you can't wait 6 seconds compared to 2 or 3 seconds that sounds like a personal lack of patience haha.
>ssds have been on the market for years >this guy goes nuts with a buzzword claiming new tech >doesnt even test new ssds We used ramdrives back in the day, "direct storage" means nothing.
Sata hdd still my favourite for cold storage and backup because that NVME prices still quite expensive and refuse to go down into or near the level of hdd. Just like BD-R and DVD-R...
Tbh, even sata ssd for forspoken is good enough. Yeah it's 6s but the difference with the fastest ssd is just 4s. Idk, maybe in the future we'll get a better game that can fully utilize Directstorage.
I think it's safe to say that if you have a decently fast GEN3 NVMe you are fine. A GEN4 is that tiny bit quicker which ist totally fine, but I think the difference between GEN4 and 5 will be just measurable. If a map loads in 0.12 seconds, oder 0,24 seconds, well.....
What Gordon failed to mention is that this game uses ds1.0 and the load times are entirely dependent on what cpu you use and we've found that no cpu on the market today can't keep up with asset stream on a Gen 4 and Gen 5 drive which is why their performance looks nearly identical to the Gen 3 drives in this game
@@ms3862 Well, even if you consider DS 1.1, do you think its way more beneficial so the delta between 4.0 and 5.0 will be much bigger? We are already talking about around 1S loading time.
I'm interested in seeing if they can turn Direct Storage into a layer that you can add in games that don't have it baked-in. Forspoken is a good test of the capability, but seeing it in older open world games would be amazing. I tried running Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen on my 2TB platter drive, and the level of stuttering as it was loading assets while navigating the world was terrible. An obvious bottleneck that was completely removed by installing the game on a SATA SSD.
Wish you had tried one of the faster pci3, from what i could google that one is only 2,260MB/s, there are def some budget ones out there with 3,500MB/s and their price can be as cheap as sata drives now. Western Digital Blue SN570 2TB usually goes under $120 on sales, only bad thing about it is 3 year instead of 5 warranty.
I do have a hope that Microsoft implement this into Bethseda (their own company) games becuase if load times are a thing as you posit, these games need load level increases. Great vid Gordon thank you
This might be the technology Todd Howard meant when he said he wanted to wait and make elder scrolls 6 when there was a new tech that would allow them to do things they can’t right now (said a few years ago) this is the most plausible explanation for what tech he was wanting. Almost certainly going to be in Elder scrolls 6. What I want is patches for their old games
I'm sorry but the take that SATA SSD drives are too slow for regular users isnt clear, you should've put some cost per TB data to make that conclusion. The LONGEST load time in any of these charts was 6.9 sec.
I think maybe the avocado mark assets are able to load in the hdd's cache making it basically an ssd. Forspoken's assets I'm guessing are too large and the hdd has to read from rge platters.
True. But in the real world that happens. How many people run Autocad modeling something complex? NVMe = SSD = HDD for many people in the real world...
Feels like a small(ish) SATA or NVMe of about 500GB will be the thing for Windows and _basic_ programs, and larger capacity NVMe drives for all the games is the way forward for the immediate future. As SATA based SSDs increase in price compared to NVMe drives, this will change, but right now the limiting factor for getting truely perfect NVMe performance is PCIe lane saturation. Maybe, if PCIe generations out pace GPU and PCIe device through-put quicker than required bandwidth, we could see changes happening in the desktop space on that.
Great video. What if I only have 1 m.2 drive slot? Would it be beneficial to go sata ssd boot drive and nvme game drive? That is the backyard builder type of choice I want to answer. Do the speeds change with direct storage if I run the game and the OS off the same drive vs 2 separate drives? So many more questions
The OS doesn't use enough bandwidth off of any modern NVMe drive to matter. There is virtually no performance benefit to keeping your games and OS on separate drives - if you run out of NVMe space, just get a PCIe to M.2 adapter card to add additional slots.
I have my os on a 256gig sata ssd, and I'm not going through the work required to move it to a nvme for no noticeable improvement. I will eventually though
Forgive my ignorance but If the gpu is bypassing the cpu and pulls directly from the source as long as i got reasonable boot drive (not hdd) what bottleneck will be added? And what data do we currently have on that? If you got a suggestion I would love to read/watch it. I am looking to optimize direct storage on a budget of space and or of money for builds for family and friends in a variety of conditions. Your suggestion won't work with an Itx build unless i pull out the graphics card for the additional storage. Downgrading to integrated graphics for an additional m.2 would defeat my intended scenario. Also also "just spend more money" buy another m.2 and a pcie card is not a solution you can't assume everyone just has more money.
And if you compare the same NVME SSD with DirectStorage turned off in the game? Of course the NVME is much faster then the SATA and NVME is on the same price level now so you are not saving money buying SATA SSD's. SATA SSD was already finished without DirectStorage IMHO.
Agreed. I started making RUclips videos a year ago and naturally found myself needing a lot more storage. After saturating my motherboard's three M.2 slots, I looked at using a PCI-e adapter to add more vs adding some SATA SSDs vs building a hard drive based NAS. SATA SSDs just _don't make sense,_ NVMEs are the same price, and if you _actually_ saturate all your motherboard's NVME capacity like I do then you probably should have a big storage server anyway.
Sata loading times so far are still pretty good and you might not have enough M.2 slots on your motherboard. Mine is an older fairly high end board and has one M.2, 8 SATA ports and 3 PCIe 16x slots; first slot is used by GPU, second shares GPU bandwidth and third is PCIe 2.0. Over time I've added a couple of SATA SSDs to increase the storage I have and they're perfectly adequate for running applications and games. NVMe drives are still a bit more expensive, and adapter cards aren't too cheap. I see no point in trying to get another NVMe at this time. I'll upgrade to a 2tb or 4tb one later when they get cheaper, I guess, but nothing for now.
@@leonro I have my Steam library on a NAS with HDD's and a cache SSD. Games load fast enough over a 10gbe LAN for me. No stuttering once I'm in-game. I'm clearly not the target customer for this. All I have in my gaming rig is a small boot SSD.
The recommendation would be two NVMe M.2, one for OS (usually smaller, around 256GB or 512 GB) and a 2TB for heavy, triple-A games. SATA SSD or hard drive is suitable for storage like pictures, docs, music, video (unless it is 4k or greater), and light indie games and emulation. SATA and Hard Disk Drives (HDD) have their place for storage capacity, and to this day, I would rather kill an HDD rewriting files over and over (video recording/surveillance footage. Primarily because they are cheaper to replace and have a longer life cycle. At least I have had one since 2007, and still running strong (WD VelociRaptor). Crystal DiskInfo reports Health Status: Good Power On count: 3616 Power On Hours: 132492 That is 15+ years' worth of service without any issues I can recall.
The only reason I can think not to do that is SSDs that small typically perform worse than the larger models. If you look at most SSDs the 512 and especially 256 are usually rated for lower speeds and IOPs, so keeping your OS on them is technically slower. Practically speaking I doubt it would make a noticeable difference
@@thegamerfromjuipiter7545 That is true. Your PC's CPU, RAM, and GPU do have a more significant difference in day-to-day use than just an SSD upgrade, although with that said, an SSD is VERY noticeable compared to a SATA HDD. Installing essential software that can benefit from a drive's speed would be better to be stored on the 2nd NVMe with the games. Still, for other basic applications like browsers, media players, Office suite, etc., you won't see a tangible difference regardless of storage speed.
This video makes no sense. Comparing different drives, but not including the same drives without using direct storage. I am kind of afraid he doesn't really understand what direct storage does. He concluded it looks really good but I didn't get it on what basis, compared to what.
DirectStorage seems like it could have good applications outside of gaming. I wonder if it could be used to speed up the OS, like faster booting, better search, drive Codec, etc.
The "Direct" in DirectStorage is the fact it allows data to flow from the drive to the GPU, bypassing the CPU. It could probably be relevant for loads such as AI computing as long as it only goes drive -> GPU -> drive (to store results), but any "general purpose" task will ultimately involve the CPU so DirectStorage is of no use there.
@@pierregrosjean6355 No, the "direct" in the name is because it's one of the many APIs that form "DirectX" some others for example; Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectDraw etc
@@Mark-kt5mh It's effectively both, unless you think Nvidia's GPUDirect is named so because of Microsoft. Also, all of the DirectX component use the name Direct.
The results of the nvme vs hdd benchmark (instead of ds off vs on) shows DS is relevant in situations where available vram is exceeded. You should have tried that with a low vram gpu instead of that 4090.
This just shows why I put only the demanding games or games with frequent load screens on NVME since I only have 2tb, and the tons of games that are less demanding I put on an 8tb raid 0 array with hybrid HDDs. The games can be easily redownloaded so I don't care about redundancy when raid 0 gives a huge performance boost. It's a small price to pay for acceptable performance with HDD capacity. It's easy to point out the heavy games that scream for bandwidth but there's still a ton of games that simply don't need it. If a game takes 5 seconds to load off the raid array I can live with that. It's the games that take 10 seconds+ that I start making space on an NVME drive. It's especially nice to have the glut of your stuff like movies and music on an HDD as they take up a ton of space but require meager throughput. Having that stuff (as long as it doesn't require backup) on any high performance high $ per GB drive is just pointless to me. A multi pronged approach for me is vastly superior to saying "just get an NVME". HDDs are still valuable in today's PCs cause not everything needs to be insanely fast, and that includes a lot of games. Capacity per dollar needs to get better before NVMEs or SSDs outnumber my huge spinny boys, but SSDs are getting close to where I might build an SSD raid array.
Yeah I bought my 2TB hybrid drive over 5 years ago now and yet 2TB is still the biggest Nvme you can get today that isn't silly money (and that's still 3/4 times the price I generally paid for storage in the past) if you have any kind of mass storage requirements the humble HDD is not quite dead yet...although with gigabit internet (finally...) arriving in my area some time this year it probably makes more sense to just redownload unless that particular file is hard to come by.
I don't think this is going to change things much. Or more to the point, I think what will happen is that direct storage will allow vendors to ship systems with less memory... less system memory and less GPU memory, and still be able to retain significant performance. What direct storage will not do is make a system already endowed with lots of ram all that much faster, because the game assets will already have been staged into GPU and system memory long before they are actually needed by the game. In anycase, there are two ways to do this. One is pretty basic... the CPU simply issues read requests to the storage system (which can be SATA, by the way) but specifies the GPU address space as the target. The second, slightly more direct method, is that the NVMe drive implements a mappable address space and directly satisfies memory requests with data from the storage media, and then the CPU and/or GPU simply access the address space directly. The latter involves significant stalls on whatever is trying to access the resource, however, so there is a limit to just how much performance can be had. Random access latency is still fairly high, generally over 8uS. The key is the bulk transfer capability which can stream more or less at the maximum rate the controller can access the NAND. -Matt
How much does the GPU change the results? All this was done with a ridiculous GPU so decompression times were probably eliminated, but how would it look if the GPU was something more common like a RTX2060?
I'd love to see a revisit showing direct storage off for each of these test results and another run using something like primocache to show the octane with the hard disk drive so the octane can have a result with for spoken.
True, but NVMe SSDs being noticeably faster to load games than SATA SSDs is something we haven't really seen before(in a meaningful way). While a Gen 3 or Gen 4 drive halve the time to a quarter of the amount of time to load respectively, the SATA SSD still does it in less than 10 seconds(versus 30-45 seconds for a HDD).
There is little to no price diffrence between SATA SSD's and NVME 4th gen when we are talking about the ATOM drive. The things like $69 bucks for 1TB! That's a smoking good deal.
Forspoken requires at minimum 150GB of storage capacity, your Optane 800P drive has only 118GB of storage capacity and is also a PCIe Gen3 x2 drive (not x4). Two reasons that might explain why you couldn't run the game on that drive.
More durable... sure. Drop a running laptop with an HDD and your data may be royally screwed. Pretty sure a SATA SSD can handle like 1000 Gs of force. The Laptop as a whole might not survive such an impact(or somewhat less of an impact) but your data proabably will. Most standard NVMe drives are about the size and shape of a stick of gum. Not something you want to drop on the floor(or get wet via leaky AIO or custom loop) but probably much more durable than a HDD once installed in a system. I can only assume by read/write limitations you mean the total terabytes written or total drive writes to the flash memory of a SSD versus reading or writing data on a HDD. As far as throughput goes(both sequential and random) SSDs are much better since they have many data paths and no moving parts versus one data path which moves and a jostling while in motion could destroy the drive. The terabytes written/drive writes only really matters as far as writes are concerned, not reads. Some of the worst in that regard are QLC based drives like the Intel 660p(100TB for the 512GB model, 200TB for the 1TB model and 400TB for my 2TB model). That's 200 total drive writes before the drive becomes write locked and becomes read only(so you can still recover data). The rest of my system has 30TB of storage(16TB internal for games, 10TB external for games, 4TB internal for mostly pics and video). Of the 26GB for games, I likely won't even fill them over 90% full(so less than 24GB) and will only copy some of the newer/larger games to half the 660p while playing them(one quarter for OS and programs, one quarter to use as SLC cache). The rest can run off the HDDs. I will probably end up updating the entire system before the 660p "dies". And QLC is getting better in regards to longevity. For Intel alone, the 665p series is 50% better than 660p series, and the 670p series improves endurance by about 25% versus the 665p series. If a drive uses older TLC nand, the endurance is far better still.
NO such thing as the END of SATA anything - the problem is NVME SSDs remain too fucking expensive and are failing way before their rated TBW, many known companies have quality control issues with their product and high failures, anything from controllers burning out, to failing components, be it Samsung, Crucial, etc they are all garbage now, Samsungs used to be top, now they have issues with drives failing prematurely, reporting wear usage despite using a fraction of the TBW, etc, the reliability and longevity of SSDs are declining very rapidly, NVME SSDs run fucking HOT and are quite expensive, you have many companies refusing to honour warranties, like Samsung and others, giving excuses, sending refurbs to replace defective units, etc, the SATA SSDs run much much slower, but they are still faster than hard drives, particularly in random 4k, BUT they also run much cooler and more reliable. I have a Samsung 960 Pro NVME, this one is good, unfortunately anything above the 960 from Samsunbg is CRAP and has high fail rates. DirectStorage sure, if people have good money to waste on buying expensive NVMEs that'll last them less than a year at most and will fail at a fraction of the promised TBW. Also Phison controllers have a high fail rate - many repairshops that are sent SSD cards to repair, are nearly mostly ones with Phison controllers.
Would have liked to see the difference between the Sabrent Rocket 4 plus and the Sabrent Rocket 4 plus-g to see if they can justify the $150 premium over the other since it's same drive.
*Direct Storage games NEED to be flexible IMO. I think they should->* 1) Allow COPY of texture folder to SYSTEM MEMORY (i.e. DDR4) on game start if sufficient DDR4 space exists (slow SSD/HDD would then be sufficient), 2) Allow auto COPY from a slow to fast SSD during initial game load (so you can buy a much smaller SSD to act as a buffer; would add very LITTLE time), 3) Stream UNCOMPRESSED texture data if the SSD and PCIe bandwidth are sufficient (shouldn't need a special GPU decompressor) *In short, you shouldn't need to buy a large, expensive SSD to store Direct Storage games on if there are ways to work around this that work fine. **Would also like to see a "FAST RESUME" method that works with the above. Such as using a fast, 512GB M.2 SSD solely for copying textures AND copying game states. A demanding game might have 40GB used (20GB for the texture folder, and 20GB for the VRAM+System memory game states).
Wouldn't constant copying of data from games on the larger, slower drive to the smaller, faster drive reduce the lifespan of the smaller, faster drive? Wouldn't it just be better to get a decent capacity drive(say 2TB) with a decent speed(NVMe Gen 3) for a decent price(about the same as a similarly sized SATA SSD, maybe a bit more) for a huge boost in performance? I personally have system with 32TB of storage between a 2TB Intel 660p(NVMe Gen 3, not the fastest but not the slowest either), a 4TB HDD, a 10TB external HDD and a 16TB HDD. My Steam library now includes over 1K games(G.O.G. and Epic around 200 games each give or take, Origin and Ubisoft Connect 2-3 dozen each, Rockstar a handful, Indigala a few dozen) and those games are installed on one of the larger drives. The other large drive is for the other game libraries, the 4TB for pictures and video, the 660p for a combination of things(OS and programs roughly allocated to about 512GB of space, more intense games temporarily copied into the next 1024GB or so from one of the larger HDDs only while playing that game, and the last 512GB or so reserved for use as more like 128GB of SLC cache since the 660p is a QLC drive with no DRAM cache). My internet is okay but not great(my fastest speeds downloading a game through Steam are like 13.5 MB/s aka 108 mbps versus say gigabit internet with 100-125 MB/s download speeds) so my goal is to have all my games installed locally on HDDs and then play the newer, larger, more intense games from the Intel 660p(if I can copy the games from from one of the larger HDDs at speeds from say 135-200 MB/s, that's like 10-15 times as fast as loading them when needed through my current internet connection and even faster than it would be if I actually had gigabit internet). But that's me.
@@artiew8718 but that is a horizontal move not a lateral move. We are now seeing pcie 5.0 on motherboards. So a gen 3 will be 2 gens behind. That is why they are cheap.
@David Jones and gen 5 will be super expensive for not that noticeable of a gain lol. For gaming. If you are gaming a gen3 nvme is perfectly fine. If you are doing work stations stuff like editing that's different
@@mattalford3932 All new gen items are more expensive just like gen 3 over gen 2 and so on. So that is not a strong argument. Your same argument was used between HDD's and SSD' when they first came out. Look how that had drastically changed. Gen 4 prices have already dropped with the release of gen 5. So people should be upgrading to a minimum of gen 4 or get left in the dust. There is only like 1 year left of gen 3 relevance. While technology is getting smaller, programs are getting larger, and with ech evolution of pcie generations the speeds are increasing. Even between gen 3 and gen 4 ssds. My gen 3 ssd was never going to reach 8gb/s like my gen 4 does. 3gb/s was fast, but not nearly as fast as 8gb/s. And with "direct-storage" on the horizon gen 3 is not going to get you the preferred speeds like gen 4 and above will.
DXVK is DirectX 9-11, so it would be vkd3d, if you're talking about Linux. However, support will have to be added for DirectStorage, before it'll work as well, though I don't know exactly where it is on that front. Based on how these things usually go, there will need to be quite a few games using it, before someone wants it badly enough to go implement it. But with any luck, Valve could submit a patch for it, much sooner than these things have taken in the past. Either way, sooner or later, it will come.
i doubt it'll kill off sata SSDs entirely, they may not be the best but they have a LOT of use and that can fill in and improve things still. They've already been displaced by NVME in devices that support them (or that have support added) for gaming and possibly some other things. But killing off Sata SSDs means mechanical still fills in (there's always a need for mass storage), Sata SSD is one of the middlegrounds that (along with hybrid mechanical drives). but realistically there is no way to tell, a lot of technologies that could of helped or of been put to use to better a generation died off. Realistically all we need is that long overdue improvement to sata 3.0 And its not impossible, SAS proves it and would be realistic means for a upgrade for a minimal cost (basically just better chipsets and same parts in motherboards would make mechanical much more appealing than it is, and also Sata SSDs as they'd take advantage of it soon too) What we're really seeing is how ssds are proving to be unreliable for long term and need to be improved. We have had a obsession with speed since they came out.
why no data showing DirectStorage on vs off? how are we supposed to see the performance uplift from DirectStorage without showing us the numbers with vs without?
Hmm ... Perhaps you meant WD Black 7,200RPM hard drive as the Blue models are typically, to my knowledge, 5400RPM drives. If you're using a 7,200RPM drive, then the majority of hard drive users will see even slower results.
The BLue models do come in 7200 RPM varieties. There is a WD20EZBX and a WD20EZAZ as examples. The EZBX is a 2TB 7200 RPM model while while the EZAZ is a 2TB 5400 RPM model. I'm going to assume that Gordon got the 7200RPM spec from MSI so unless MSI switched out drives on him he was actually working with a 7200RPM drive.
@@rdspam Thanks for putting me right on that. I'd never seen a 7,200RPM Blue, other than the 640Gb I bought 12 years back,. Good to know they're still around :)
What are the gen 4s like with DirectStorage off? Thanks for the tip at the start to show how to find out if it's supported, looks like I've got 2 drives that support it. But how do we activate it? At 28:20 why did the HDD game have up to 20 fps more than when it was loaded from Direct Storage?
It's loading the GPU up so you will lose frames from that, personally I'd rather wait an extra 10s for it to load and keep all my frames and the hit could be much bigger on cards below the 4090 but this game is a shitshow so it might just be down to that in the end.
@@mintydog06 It's highly unlikely to be doing nothing, most games like this will stream assets in on the fly so it can theoretically drop your framerate if it's passing some of that work to the GPU.
I've just tried the demo of Forspoken and I can't see the benchmark there. Did some fiddling from a 980 Pro 2Tb and shuffled it to my other Sabrent RocketQ 1tb (QLC, but not a slow drive in reads by any means as it's 3400mb/s) and on a B550 board.. I can't tell the difference of loading from one to another unless I grab a stopwatch and see that the game maybe loads a tiny little less faster. I haven't tried yet from my other Crucial MX500. To be honest Sata SSDs doesn't seem so garbage to load even DS games off from them.
I would have been much more interested to see comparison numbers using a more budget GPU, like a mid tier 3070/4070 or something, most gamers are not running a 4090, but maybe the results are strictly linear, idk. Wouldhave been nice to know.
no, if you read/write at max sata speeds like cross-point (x-point) does, 600MB/s random access Q1 speeds, point at the cross, not at the people, you judges
Should have tested on a P5800X to see just where things could be in another 10-15 years. It's an interesting benchmark, for sure, but the more interesting impact will be when you start talking about asset streaming with DirectStorage; how much of an FPS impact will that eventually lead to. Shorter load times are definitely great, but as presented, even the difference *with* DirectStorage is only on the order of a few seconds here and there.
Really good tests, thanks for puttiing in the work, it's itneresting to see the differences between SATA, Gen3 and Gen4 SSDs, as well as Host Bust SSDs and ones with DRAM cache, and QLC vs TLC, shows that there are technical performance differences.
@22:04 note the early generation SSD drives are about as fast as the top of the line mechanical HDD at 7200 rpm. This is consistent with what earlier consumers found, that at best solid state drives were roughly 2x of the mechanical hard drive, at best, and often about the same in real world performance. Once again, you've been had if you try and follow the consumer electronics hype, which is geared towards making gullible consumers like you BUY, BUY, BUY. That said, to impress my girl, I got her a state of the art laptop recently. What I've noticed is that often the people who do real work, and that includes programmers, often work on out-of-date hardware, or at least not bleeding edge. Gamers and women and people who are into signaling are the drivers of buying the latest cutting edge stuff. Writing this from a 12 year old laptop I got for $100 on eBay, and for my needs, it works fine. Cuz i'm a boss...
And even the red bar for the first scene in the complex testing game "Forspoken" shows that an earlier gen SSD is only about 2.5x faster than a mechanical HDD (6.5/2.55 avg. time in seconds = 2.54x ratio)
What I'm wondering is will this fix the stuttering that plagues most modern PC games? It does seem like its asset rendering stuttering most of the time...
Not bad but you forgot to test everything with DirectStorage OFF. How do we know the uplift isn’t just from the interface and bandwidths of the drives?
*the number we ACTUALLY need...* Load times are important, but we really need to see where the cutoff is before you get STUTTER in-game because textures can't load in fast enough. That will vary by the game. If a slower SSD works fine in-game but just loads in six seconds instead of two seconds I'm certainly not spending more money for the fast SSD (or worse upgrading my motherboard etc just for a faster SSD). In my other post I also recommend that games are flexible so they can copy from slow to fast SSD or system memory so you don't need to have the game installed to a fast SSD in theory... if I had Windows 11 on a fast, 512GB SSD (i.e. 8GBps) then maybe I want the ability to dedicate 200GB as the Direct Storage game buffer (and FAST RESUME when that comes to PC) rather than buy another 1TB SSD just so I can install Direct Storage games to it. Or worse, buy the expensive, fast SSD and only have a couple games that even need Direct Storage.
games will be designed and tested around specific target technology, so it's more of "when will developer start ignoring users that don't have direct storage" Think of current games that will stutter on mechanical drives because they didn't bother with access patterns (because it matters so little with SSDs)
Why is the MSI Drive at the top of the Crystal Disk mark chart? Seems like its worse in every metric compared to the SK Hynix? Did they pay for that spot?
I think it would have been really much better to compare DirectStorage ON vs. OFF if possible
That's what i came here to say as well. There's no data frame of reference to tell us if DirectStorage if better or not, which i think is what most people want to know.
I kept waiting for that... I feel cheated, Gordon. How is this a test of "DirectStorage" instead of just "NVME drives vs. SATA?"
DS1.1 works on all storage so in a round about way it is compared. The scene load times are about the same here as they are in most games with a similar drive.(Hence it's about the drive not the API) The conclusion for this video is if you are still "GAMING" on a HDD it is time to get an NVMe drive. If you are on a SATA SSD and your load times VS NVMe can be reasonably measured in milliseconds then it is likely good enough. This is the only game that uses DS1.1 right now and it is far from optimized. Until we see the DS API implemented in a game without a broken back this is all conjecture. Anyway it's all about what we ourselves can palette not our neighbor.
@@ncohafmuta digital foundry tested DS off, it's a big difference even to framerate - turning direct storage off cuts framerate in Forspoken in half. Since direct storage works with all storage drives it even benefits old HDD, there is no reason the gamer should disable it especially not as it destroys the game's performance
Pretty sure it's not something you can just toggle on and off.
DirectStorage sends the data, direct from storage, to its designated work area, rather than send everything to the cpu to let the cpu sort it out. It probably wouldn't be able to run through the traditional pipeline without modification to tell the cpu how to sort it.
I'm interested to see a control test with your fastest NVMe and direct storage on and off.
SATA is very useful... until manufacturers give us way more PCIe lanes (for installing HBAs, NVMe, etc instead) we need SATA on the motherboard.
SATA SSD will still be useful for years to come, you can't beat the cost benefit of having a large SSD for all your games. And it runs insanely cooler than a NVMe under heavy load.
i use sata ssds and sata hdds for that purpose too, i can store way more for way less, and speed things up with primocache.
Also keep in mind that speeds in HDD may vary depending in the phisical location of the files on the discs, while an SSD should have basically the same speeds everywhere.
Many of the low end ones don't follow that rule in that they have some fast flash and some slow flash and rely on a host side buffer since they don't have any RAM on board. Low end SSDs can be really inconsistent in both time and space on the disk.
Hybrid HDD are pretty quick, and you can partician or stroke your hdd, the first 10-30% of a hdd is faster than the outer edges. I have all 4, m.2, ssd, shdd, and hdd for storage.
This needed to be a test with and without DirectStorage to make sense, as this just shows a faster drive gives lower load times. (And no counter examples showing several non-DirectStorage games not being able to scale linearly.) I see the game supports Win10, wouldn't that be a good way to show if DirectStorage does anything significant?
No need to use a different OS. You can turn off directstorage.
The result look to me like the demise of SATA SSD storage is greatly exaggerated: going from 3-6s load times to 1-3s isn't a big deal. HDDs on the other hand have mostly outlived their usefulness for most things besides archival. I still have my lesser played Steam games on a 1TB WD Black HDD.
Yeah from 2s load to 6s is eh. It's still way faster than HDD that hover around 30s.
I have 2x 2TB Seagate 7200 drives and i one for photos, videos etc the other for games back up but really old games that load fast in a HDD I use as well. Demanding games ssds all the way
I have 3 WD Caviar Black 1TB drivers that have been in like 3 builds now, those things are indestructible. They have to be pushing 15 years now and still going strong.
It's basically a tech demo at this point as no one is going to make a game that REQUIRES direct storage on the PC side as the installed market is too small. If there's a killer app that NEEDS direct storage to work then it will take off, otherwise it is just an incremental improvement on load times. The change from a good HDD to a good SSD was revolutionary. The change from a good SSD to a GREAT SSD is often not something you notice (unless it's a DRAMless SSD....)
I'm still currently running my indie games off a 1TB WD VelociRaptor 10,000RPM HDD (The only HDD I still have in my system). My OS is installed on an PCIe 4.0 Optane P5800X. My modern games are installed across a 2TB WD Black SN850 NVMe Gen4 drive and a 4TB WD Blue SATA SSD.
You know, tech reviewers are always announcing the "end" of some technology or some technology "killer". The problem is that often it doesn't happen or if it does happen it's years away so it's hard to take statements like this at all seriously.
I'm missing the DirectStorage on vs off times. If you have a faster SSD, the load times are shorter, yes. But how much do they get shorter by DirectStorage and how much by faster storage?
The result looks great on paper (300-400% faster), but in real life test, going from 4s loading time to 1s loading time hardly matters
We're seeing diminishing returns.
@@Centrioless My question is if this really is 1s vs 4s. I'm on Windows 10 so, i'm not getting DirectStorage anytime soon. What if it's 1s vs 1.5s? That would be far from a compelling reason to update to Windows 11.
And then there's the question of optimisation. If DirectStorage comes with a library with optimised code, that runs on the gpu, and DirectStorage off is whatever the developers programmed, it would be an unfair comparison. Imagine, loading the data 1st, then decompress it, then transfer to the gpu, vs loading the data, while loading begin decompressing, and while decompressing begin transferring.
There are huge gains to be had with optimised software. An example for that is Horizon Zero Dawn vs Forbidden West on a ps4 pro with a ssd. Horizon Forbidden West loads much faster, the more complex and better looking game, on the same hardware. My conspiracy theory is that they implemented the DirectStorage technology on the ps5, the performance was disappointing, then they optimised the game in general, and most of the benefit in loading times from Horizon 1 on ps4 vs Horizon 2 on ps5 comes from general software optimisation and the fast ssd, in equal parts, and dead last the DirectStorage technology.
@@mimi8505 Most recent versions of Windows 10 support DirectStorage as long as you have a DX12 gpu...
I'm genuinely confused with these results as the rule of thumb "HDDs being an order of magnitude slower that SSDs, SATA being 2x slower than NVME and gen3 being 2x slower than gen4" is pretty much the only thing we can see here. Direct storage or not, having a faster drive DOES speed loading times up.
Where's the expected benefit of direct storage then ? According to both theoretical explanations, and a benchmark from LTT, loading times should be 4x faster from DirectStorage alone, making compatible nvme drives at the very least 8x faster than non-DirectStorage SATA ones. That's not at all what we see here...
With your charts alone and no additional ON/OFF comparison, the only 2 things we could conclude are HDDs are slow (we already knew that) and DirectStorage doesn't seem to do anything to improve loading times.
Haven't seen the LTT video(yet), but I think these Forspoken benchmarks really show the potential of Direct Storage. Obviously in most modern games you will see a pretty substantial difference between load times on a HDD and almost any SSD(SATA or NVMe). However, what you won't really see is much of difference between a SATA SSD and a NVMe SSD. Technically, even a Gen 3 NVMe can be like 6 or 7 times faster than a SATA SSD(in synthetic benchmarks) but you don't really see hardly any difference at all in the vast majority of games. While the difference here isn't quite that dramatic, it is certainly noticeable. And Gen 4 drives are even faster, but also have a price premium attached(you can find pretty good Gen 3 drives for similar prices conpared to the same size SATA SSD, but Gen 4 drives always cost more. Sometimes a lot more).
You mention HDDs being an order of magnitude slower than a SATA SSD, but it depends on what you are measuring. A modern SATA 3 SSD tops out at around 550 MB/s in sequential read speeds where HDDS vary greatly depending on the amount of storage(total storage versus number of platters so how densely is the data packed on each platter) and RPMs(slower spinning 5400 RPM drives versus faster 7200 RPM drives or even more enterprise themed drives with 10,000 RPM or 15,000 RPM speeds). A decent capacity 5400 RPM drive can get well over 100 MB/s sequential reads and a 7200 RPM drive can get over 200 MB/s. The real difference lies in random reads. The hard drive has an average seek time(lets say around 4ms as that's pretty standard). That means you are averaging only around say 250 random reads (more or less) per second(with very small bits of data. The read/write head will stick around an area of disk longer when reading a larger amount of sequential data, assuming it isn't heavily fragmented). Since an SSD has no moving parts, it's only limited internally by the number of data pathways available(governed by the flash memory chips themselves and the controller). Even slower SATA SSDs can have tens of thousands of iops, making them a few orders of magnitude faster when it comes to random reads(An SSD might drop into the tens of MB/s range with extreme random reads, where a HDD might drop to a few hundred KB/s in the same extreme test). Faster NVMe drives can have over 100k iops or even over 1M for the newest, fastest drives. What we see when loading game assets is likely a mix of random reads(jumping around to load certain things into a scene) and sequential(many of those assets are relatively large).
Basically so pop-in of assets in game just isn't a thing anymore and higher resolution assets can be used without affecting frame rate. Load times are just a part of it, it is more about getting data to the GPU as efficiently as possible and not being slowed down by CPU and system RAM.
Is there any way to test on the MSI drive and have Direct storage turned off so we can get an idea of what difference is between direct storage and not with all other things being equal
“Direct storage is great” without an on/off comparison is pretty meaningless.
@@rdspam and comparing it to HDD is laughable, seems like a cheap advertising move when on the CES presentation you see "2500% speedup*" then in small print "* compared to decade old tech".
I like this guy, seems like he's really genuine and not like the rest of the other RUclipsrs out there.
4tb Crucial P3 Plus for 300€ seems like the 'budget' move.
Hey thanks for the heads up. Looking into that now
No offense, but I don't see myself paying more than 100 bucks for a SSD with QLC flash and without RAM cache.
Unfortunately due to high prices it's still hard to get any kind of high capacity ssds, some ppl still make use if hdds, so no sata ssds are going nowhere any time soon.
You can put your photos and music on the old SATA drives. Save a bit more space on the new drive for the videos and games.
I think that Square didn't do any of the old tricks that game devs did with HDDs back in the day, A lot of times they would put in assets multiple times in the files so the spinning of the drive wouldn't have to seek randomly which can take much longer. As opposed to SSDs which are pretty king at it with no moving parts. I certainly don't blame Square, since even consoles are fully SSDs now, but yeah. I think that means that SATA SSDs are going to be fine for years to come as well, but if the cost is the same and you have an M.2 PCIe slot, I'd say its more important than ever to go PCIe M.2 when building now.
Its Luminous productions, not Square Enix. Its a big difference between being developer and being distributor
Says the industry shill.... lol. NVMe = SSD = HDD for many people in the real world.
@@raylopez99 No. Any modern SSD(NVMe or even SATA) will provide a noticeable difference in everyday computing tasks compared to a HDD. IDK about basic desktops designed for office use, but pretty much all laptops and at least gaming class desktops ship with SSDs for a reason. People use their PCs for more than just gaming(doesn't have to be super intensive stuff, even basic web browsing and video streaming) and having any kind of fairly modern SSD versus a HDD makes a big difference in day to day use.
And a lot of people do game on their PC. Avocado Mark aside, Forspoken is a real game and only the first to implement Direct Storage. That first scene in the benchmark(from what I've seen in videos of the game) only represents the very first part of the game with possibly quite a lot of cut scenes and perhaps relatively little interactive game play for the player. All the other scenes are the meat of the game. And it is here we see a massive difference between a hard drive(30 second load time minimum, sometimes closer to 45 seconds) versus even a SATA SSD(under 10 seconds). And if you can both find an NVMe drive of the same capacity for about the same price as a SATA SSD and have an available NVMe slot on your motherboard, it really is a no brainer to get the NVMe drive(load times get cut in about half again from well under 10 seconds to well under 5 seconds). And that's just an older, slower, lower capacity Gen 3 drive. You can find faster, higher capacity Gen 3 drives for relatively cheap. Maybe not so much for Gen 4 or 5 drives, though.
@@raylopez99 LMAO
SSDs are faster than hard disks. Newer SSDs are faster than old ones. Who didn't know this?
3 of my drives are represented here-860 Evo, sk Hynix p41, WD blue. Nice!
26:48 i dont know what he's talking about but my system have a NVMe for Boot, and 2 cheap SSD for games and i don't fell my system is holding back
Cool, now I’ve watched an entire video on Direct Storage. So how much faster is a drive with Direct Storage vs. the same drive without?
No idea. 😮
Yeah, I really don't get the point of this video.
What a waste of time. Should have been so obvious that a control was needed in any comparison like this.
Hard drives are still viable options for storing things like documents and pictures. However, even without direct storage, I won't install games on HDD's anymore. I have 2 NVMe's and 2 SATA SSD's that I run my games from. Pricing on M.2 and SATA SSD's are finally really close to what HDD's have been, so there's no reason to pick up a couple.
Thank you for testing with optane. Pity you didn't have one of the 380GB or larger (960, 1.5TB etc) models
I'll probably wait for more implementation before upgrading my Sata SSD to an NVME
The experience is fine for gaming ex:
2 seconds vs 8 seconds is 400% diff in stats but in reality just a sip of water
Also i mainly game in VR I'm wondering how much Direct Storage would help there
I'm honestly very surprised and happy with my satas VR load performance
SATA SSDs are still good for gaming load times IMO for people on a strict budget. If you can't wait 6 seconds compared to 2 or 3 seconds that sounds like a personal lack of patience haha.
Any game list with DirectStorage support ?
>ssds have been on the market for years
>this guy goes nuts with a buzzword claiming new tech
>doesnt even test new ssds
We used ramdrives back in the day, "direct storage" means nothing.
Sata hdd still my favourite for cold storage and backup because that NVME prices still quite expensive and refuse to go down into or near the level of hdd. Just like BD-R and DVD-R...
There are logs for the benchmark in forspoken. It's stored a few folders into the appdata folder in the user folder.
Tbh, even sata ssd for forspoken is good enough. Yeah it's 6s but the difference with the fastest ssd is just 4s.
Idk, maybe in the future we'll get a better game that can fully utilize Directstorage.
Sata drives are still Ok for data drives. Now we just need 2tb & 4tb NVME's to come down in price!!
I think it's safe to say that if you have a decently fast GEN3 NVMe you are fine. A GEN4 is that tiny bit quicker which ist totally fine, but I think the difference between GEN4 and 5 will be just measurable. If a map loads in 0.12 seconds, oder 0,24 seconds, well.....
what the time on gen 5 coming out ?
@@kennethpereyda5707 I guess the first GEN5 Drives will BE available in 3-6 months from now. Corsair already announced the MP700.
@@t3chn0m0 thanks for the reply- I think I'll wait until then for a new MB
What Gordon failed to mention is that this game uses ds1.0 and the load times are entirely dependent on what cpu you use and we've found that no cpu on the market today can't keep up with asset stream on a Gen 4 and Gen 5 drive which is why their performance looks nearly identical to the Gen 3 drives in this game
@@ms3862 Well, even if you consider DS 1.1, do you think its way more beneficial so the delta between 4.0 and 5.0 will be much bigger? We are already talking about around 1S loading time.
I'm interested in seeing if they can turn Direct Storage into a layer that you can add in games that don't have it baked-in. Forspoken is a good test of the capability, but seeing it in older open world games would be amazing. I tried running Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen on my 2TB platter drive, and the level of stuttering as it was loading assets while navigating the world was terrible. An obvious bottleneck that was completely removed by installing the game on a SATA SSD.
Wish you had tried one of the faster pci3, from what i could google that one is only 2,260MB/s, there are def some budget ones out there with 3,500MB/s and their price can be as cheap as sata drives now. Western Digital Blue SN570 2TB usually goes under $120 on sales, only bad thing about it is 3 year instead of 5 warranty.
Would have loved to seen something more mainstream like a 970 Evo 1tb nvme
I do have a hope that Microsoft implement this into Bethseda (their own company) games becuase if load times are a thing as you posit, these games need load level increases. Great vid Gordon thank you
This might be the technology Todd Howard meant when he said he wanted to wait and make elder scrolls 6 when there was a new tech that would allow them to do things they can’t right now (said a few years ago) this is the most plausible explanation for what tech he was wanting. Almost certainly going to be in Elder scrolls 6. What I want is patches for their old games
Bethesda games 🤮🤮💩💩
Especially when you add 400 plus mods really make them load times a bit longer
I'm sorry but the take that SATA SSD drives are too slow for regular users isnt clear, you should've put some cost per TB data to make that conclusion. The LONGEST load time in any of these charts was 6.9 sec.
Lets not let logic and facts get in the way of a paid content piece!
Okay but what difference does it make? You don't make an actual test of the same SSD with DirectStorage on and off.
I think maybe the avocado mark assets are able to load in the hdd's cache making it basically an ssd. Forspoken's assets I'm guessing are too large and the hdd has to read from rge platters.
True. But in the real world that happens. How many people run Autocad modeling something complex? NVMe = SSD = HDD for many people in the real world...
i miss when people testing. knew the software they where talking about.....
Feels like a small(ish) SATA or NVMe of about 500GB will be the thing for Windows and _basic_ programs, and larger capacity NVMe drives for all the games is the way forward for the immediate future. As SATA based SSDs increase in price compared to NVMe drives, this will change, but right now the limiting factor for getting truely perfect NVMe performance is PCIe lane saturation.
Maybe, if PCIe generations out pace GPU and PCIe device through-put quicker than required bandwidth, we could see changes happening in the desktop space on that.
Well pcie 5 is already way more than what current gpus need as far as a x16 slot is concerned
A man like me runs *basic* programs off of a floppy, or enters them manually
Great video.
What if I only have 1 m.2 drive slot? Would it be beneficial to go sata ssd boot drive and nvme game drive? That is the backyard builder type of choice I want to answer. Do the speeds change with direct storage if I run the game and the OS off the same drive vs 2 separate drives? So many more questions
The OS doesn't use enough bandwidth off of any modern NVMe drive to matter. There is virtually no performance benefit to keeping your games and OS on separate drives - if you run out of NVMe space, just get a PCIe to M.2 adapter card to add additional slots.
I have my os on a 256gig sata ssd, and I'm not going through the work required to move it to a nvme for no noticeable improvement. I will eventually though
@Daniel Stenger there's some advantages to putting the os on its own drive even today. But nothing like it was when ssds first came out.
Forgive my ignorance but If the gpu is bypassing the cpu and pulls directly from the source as long as i got reasonable boot drive (not hdd) what bottleneck will be added? And what data do we currently have on that? If you got a suggestion I would love to read/watch it.
I am looking to optimize direct storage on a budget of space and or of money for builds for family and friends in a variety of conditions. Your suggestion won't work with an Itx build unless i pull out the graphics card for the additional storage. Downgrading to integrated graphics for an additional m.2 would defeat my intended scenario.
Also also "just spend more money" buy another m.2 and a pcie card is not a solution you can't assume everyone just has more money.
And if you compare the same NVME SSD with DirectStorage turned off in the game? Of course the NVME is much faster then the SATA and NVME is on the same price level now so you are not saving money buying SATA SSD's. SATA SSD was already finished without DirectStorage IMHO.
Agreed. I started making RUclips videos a year ago and naturally found myself needing a lot more storage. After saturating my motherboard's three M.2 slots, I looked at using a PCI-e adapter to add more vs adding some SATA SSDs vs building a hard drive based NAS. SATA SSDs just _don't make sense,_ NVMEs are the same price, and if you _actually_ saturate all your motherboard's NVME capacity like I do then you probably should have a big storage server anyway.
Sata loading times so far are still pretty good and you might not have enough M.2 slots on your motherboard. Mine is an older fairly high end board and has one M.2, 8 SATA ports and 3 PCIe 16x slots; first slot is used by GPU, second shares GPU bandwidth and third is PCIe 2.0. Over time I've added a couple of SATA SSDs to increase the storage I have and they're perfectly adequate for running applications and games. NVMe drives are still a bit more expensive, and adapter cards aren't too cheap. I see no point in trying to get another NVMe at this time. I'll upgrade to a 2tb or 4tb one later when they get cheaper, I guess, but nothing for now.
@@leonro I have my Steam library on a NAS with HDD's and a cache SSD. Games load fast enough over a 10gbe LAN for me. No stuttering once I'm in-game. I'm clearly not the target customer for this. All I have in my gaming rig is a small boot SSD.
I dont see many actual reviews coming from Gordon anymore. Thanks for that Gordon. Do more if you can. One older guy to another.
The recommendation would be two NVMe M.2, one for OS (usually smaller, around 256GB or 512 GB) and a 2TB for heavy, triple-A games. SATA SSD or hard drive is suitable for storage like pictures, docs, music, video (unless it is 4k or greater), and light indie games and emulation.
SATA and Hard Disk Drives (HDD) have their place for storage capacity, and to this day, I would rather kill an HDD rewriting files over and over (video recording/surveillance footage. Primarily because they are cheaper to replace and have a longer life cycle. At least I have had one since 2007, and still running strong (WD VelociRaptor).
Crystal DiskInfo reports
Health Status: Good
Power On count: 3616
Power On Hours: 132492
That is 15+ years' worth of service without any issues I can recall.
The only reason I can think not to do that is SSDs that small typically perform worse than the larger models. If you look at most SSDs the 512 and especially 256 are usually rated for lower speeds and IOPs, so keeping your OS on them is technically slower. Practically speaking I doubt it would make a noticeable difference
@@thegamerfromjuipiter7545 That is true. Your PC's CPU, RAM, and GPU do have a more significant difference in day-to-day use than just an SSD upgrade, although with that said, an SSD is VERY noticeable compared to a SATA HDD.
Installing essential software that can benefit from a drive's speed would be better to be stored on the 2nd NVMe with the games. Still, for other basic applications like browsers, media players, Office suite, etc., you won't see a tangible difference regardless of storage speed.
Also, if you have hardware raid, DirectStorage is not supported. 'Claims the raided drives are not nVME, even though they are.
Not sure if the demo version actually works. I tried the game on both qlc nvme and tlc m.2 sata and game loads and works more or less the same.
This video makes no sense. Comparing different drives, but not including the same drives without using direct storage. I am kind of afraid he doesn't really understand what direct storage does. He concluded it looks really good but I didn't get it on what basis, compared to what.
DirectStorage seems like it could have good applications outside of gaming. I wonder if it could be used to speed up the OS, like faster booting, better search, drive Codec, etc.
The "Direct" in DirectStorage is the fact it allows data to flow from the drive to the GPU, bypassing the CPU. It could probably be relevant for loads such as AI computing as long as it only goes drive -> GPU -> drive (to store results), but any "general purpose" task will ultimately involve the CPU so DirectStorage is of no use there.
@@pierregrosjean6355 Too bad windows doesn't still have Clippy or directstorage might help there.
@@pierregrosjean6355 No, the "direct" in the name is because it's one of the many APIs that form "DirectX" some others for example; Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectDraw etc
@@Mark-kt5mh It's effectively both, unless you think Nvidia's GPUDirect is named so because of Microsoft. Also, all of the DirectX component use the name Direct.
The results of the nvme vs hdd benchmark (instead of ds off vs on) shows DS is relevant in situations where available vram is exceeded. You should have tried that with a low vram gpu instead of that 4090.
3:13 I'll be testing this on the Intel Optane 905P 960GB u.2 drive.
This just shows why I put only the demanding games or games with frequent load screens on NVME since I only have 2tb, and the tons of games that are less demanding I put on an 8tb raid 0 array with hybrid HDDs. The games can be easily redownloaded so I don't care about redundancy when raid 0 gives a huge performance boost. It's a small price to pay for acceptable performance with HDD capacity. It's easy to point out the heavy games that scream for bandwidth but there's still a ton of games that simply don't need it.
If a game takes 5 seconds to load off the raid array I can live with that. It's the games that take 10 seconds+ that I start making space on an NVME drive.
It's especially nice to have the glut of your stuff like movies and music on an HDD as they take up a ton of space but require meager throughput. Having that stuff (as long as it doesn't require backup) on any high performance high $ per GB drive is just pointless to me.
A multi pronged approach for me is vastly superior to saying "just get an NVME". HDDs are still valuable in today's PCs cause not everything needs to be insanely fast, and that includes a lot of games. Capacity per dollar needs to get better before NVMEs or SSDs outnumber my huge spinny boys, but SSDs are getting close to where I might build an SSD raid array.
Yeah I bought my 2TB hybrid drive over 5 years ago now and yet 2TB is still the biggest Nvme you can get today that isn't silly money (and that's still 3/4 times the price I generally paid for storage in the past) if you have any kind of mass storage requirements the humble HDD is not quite dead yet...although with gigabit internet (finally...) arriving in my area some time this year it probably makes more sense to just redownload unless that particular file is hard to come by.
I don't think this is going to change things much. Or more to the point, I think what will happen is that direct storage will allow vendors to ship systems with less memory... less system memory and less GPU memory, and still be able to retain significant performance. What direct storage will not do is make a system already endowed with lots of ram all that much faster, because the game assets will already have been staged into GPU and system memory long before they are actually needed by the game.
In anycase, there are two ways to do this. One is pretty basic... the CPU simply issues read requests to the storage system (which can be SATA, by the way) but specifies the GPU address space as the target. The second, slightly more direct method, is that the NVMe drive implements a mappable address space and directly satisfies memory requests with data from the storage media, and then the CPU and/or GPU simply access the address space directly. The latter involves significant stalls on whatever is trying to access the resource, however, so there is a limit to just how much performance can be had.
Random access latency is still fairly high, generally over 8uS. The key is the bulk transfer capability which can stream more or less at the maximum rate the controller can access the NAND.
-Matt
Him: 1.2 seconds is slow for direct storage. Me: plays from a 3tb Steam library on a 12tb hdd through an AMD R9 380.
What about putting hard drives in a RAID0. Would direct storage even work with RAID, does it still need to go through the CPU to reassemble the data?
lol i havnt owned a HDD in a decade i dont even own SATA drives 600 MBs still to slow for me
What I want to know is when DaVinci Resolve will support direct storage...
How much does the GPU change the results? All this was done with a ridiculous GPU so decompression times were probably eliminated, but how would it look if the GPU was something more common like a RTX2060?
What happened to the Optane in the Forspoken benchmark? Did it not back up your point or was it just too small to hold the game?
I'd love to see a revisit showing direct storage off for each of these test results and another run using something like primocache to show the octane with the hard disk drive so the octane can have a result with for spoken.
HDD's being much slower than SSD's for games is hardly a revelation.
True, but NVMe SSDs being noticeably faster to load games than SATA SSDs is something we haven't really seen before(in a meaningful way). While a Gen 3 or Gen 4 drive halve the time to a quarter of the amount of time to load respectively, the SATA SSD still does it in less than 10 seconds(versus 30-45 seconds for a HDD).
Does direct storage need to be enabled by the game dev as well?
Yes.
@@DaveGamesVT Cheers
Hopefully many many older games get this feature implemented
I dunno, that means we need actually 2 GPUS if we want direct storage to be more accurate and more effectively used.
There is little to no price diffrence between SATA SSD's and NVME 4th gen when we are talking about the ATOM drive. The things like $69 bucks for 1TB! That's a smoking good deal.
Forspoken requires at minimum 150GB of storage capacity, your Optane 800P drive has only 118GB of storage capacity and is also a PCIe Gen3 x2 drive (not x4). Two reasons that might explain why you couldn't run the game on that drive.
Oh wow, Forspoken did something for us after all.
Also, been a long time coming, finally subscribed :D
you forgot to say that hard drives are also durable, moreover, it does not have write/read limitations like NVMe
But how will Gordon convince the normies that they need the shiny new expensive thing?!
More durable... sure. Drop a running laptop with an HDD and your data may be royally screwed. Pretty sure a SATA SSD can handle like 1000 Gs of force. The Laptop as a whole might not survive such an impact(or somewhat less of an impact) but your data proabably will. Most standard NVMe drives are about the size and shape of a stick of gum. Not something you want to drop on the floor(or get wet via leaky AIO or custom loop) but probably much more durable than a HDD once installed in a system.
I can only assume by read/write limitations you mean the total terabytes written or total drive writes to the flash memory of a SSD versus reading or writing data on a HDD. As far as throughput goes(both sequential and random) SSDs are much better since they have many data paths and no moving parts versus one data path which moves and a jostling while in motion could destroy the drive. The terabytes written/drive writes only really matters as far as writes are concerned, not reads. Some of the worst in that regard are QLC based drives like the Intel 660p(100TB for the 512GB model, 200TB for the 1TB model and 400TB for my 2TB model). That's 200 total drive writes before the drive becomes write locked and becomes read only(so you can still recover data). The rest of my system has 30TB of storage(16TB internal for games, 10TB external for games, 4TB internal for mostly pics and video). Of the 26GB for games, I likely won't even fill them over 90% full(so less than 24GB) and will only copy some of the newer/larger games to half the 660p while playing them(one quarter for OS and programs, one quarter to use as SLC cache). The rest can run off the HDDs. I will probably end up updating the entire system before the 660p "dies". And QLC is getting better in regards to longevity. For Intel alone, the 665p series is 50% better than 660p series, and the 670p series improves endurance by about 25% versus the 665p series. If a drive uses older TLC nand, the endurance is far better still.
NO such thing as the END of SATA anything - the problem is NVME SSDs remain too fucking expensive and are failing way before their rated TBW, many known companies have quality control issues with their product and high failures, anything from controllers burning out, to failing components, be it Samsung, Crucial, etc they are all garbage now, Samsungs used to be top, now they have issues with drives failing prematurely, reporting wear usage despite using a fraction of the TBW, etc, the reliability and longevity of SSDs are declining very rapidly, NVME SSDs run fucking HOT and are quite expensive, you have many companies refusing to honour warranties, like Samsung and others, giving excuses, sending refurbs to replace defective units, etc, the SATA SSDs run much much slower, but they are still faster than hard drives, particularly in random 4k, BUT they also run much cooler and more reliable. I have a Samsung 960 Pro NVME, this one is good, unfortunately anything above the 960 from Samsunbg is CRAP and has high fail rates. DirectStorage sure, if people have good money to waste on buying expensive NVMEs that'll last them less than a year at most and will fail at a fraction of the promised TBW. Also Phison controllers have a high fail rate - many repairshops that are sent SSD cards to repair, are nearly mostly ones with Phison controllers.
Weird comparison... Should've been DirectStorage against the same SSD with no DirectStorage enabled...
Would have liked to see the difference between the Sabrent Rocket 4 plus and the Sabrent Rocket 4 plus-g to see if they can justify the $150 premium over the other since it's same drive.
*Direct Storage games NEED to be flexible IMO. I think they should->*
1) Allow COPY of texture folder to SYSTEM MEMORY (i.e. DDR4) on game start if sufficient DDR4 space exists (slow SSD/HDD would then be sufficient),
2) Allow auto COPY from a slow to fast SSD during initial game load (so you can buy a much smaller SSD to act as a buffer; would add very LITTLE time),
3) Stream UNCOMPRESSED texture data if the SSD and PCIe bandwidth are sufficient (shouldn't need a special GPU decompressor)
*In short, you shouldn't need to buy a large, expensive SSD to store Direct Storage games on if there are ways to work around this that work fine.
**Would also like to see a "FAST RESUME" method that works with the above. Such as using a fast, 512GB M.2 SSD solely for copying textures AND copying game states. A demanding game might have 40GB used (20GB for the texture folder, and 20GB for the VRAM+System memory game states).
Wouldn't constant copying of data from games on the larger, slower drive to the smaller, faster drive reduce the lifespan of the smaller, faster drive? Wouldn't it just be better to get a decent capacity drive(say 2TB) with a decent speed(NVMe Gen 3) for a decent price(about the same as a similarly sized SATA SSD, maybe a bit more) for a huge boost in performance?
I personally have system with 32TB of storage between a 2TB Intel 660p(NVMe Gen 3, not the fastest but not the slowest either), a 4TB HDD, a 10TB external HDD and a 16TB HDD. My Steam library now includes over 1K games(G.O.G. and Epic around 200 games each give or take, Origin and Ubisoft Connect 2-3 dozen each, Rockstar a handful, Indigala a few dozen) and those games are installed on one of the larger drives. The other large drive is for the other game libraries, the 4TB for pictures and video, the 660p for a combination of things(OS and programs roughly allocated to about 512GB of space, more intense games temporarily copied into the next 1024GB or so from one of the larger HDDs only while playing that game, and the last 512GB or so reserved for use as more like 128GB of SLC cache since the 660p is a QLC drive with no DRAM cache). My internet is okay but not great(my fastest speeds downloading a game through Steam are like 13.5 MB/s aka 108 mbps versus say gigabit internet with 100-125 MB/s download speeds) so my goal is to have all my games installed locally on HDDs and then play the newer, larger, more intense games from the Intel 660p(if I can copy the games from from one of the larger HDDs at speeds from say 135-200 MB/s, that's like 10-15 times as fast as loading them when needed through my current internet connection and even faster than it would be if I actually had gigabit internet). But that's me.
There is still a bit of a price gap between m.2 and sata ssd. You can get a much larger capacity sata ssd cheaper than the same in a m.2 variant.
Wd sn570 is a good bargain
@@artiew8718 but that is a horizontal move not a lateral move. We are now seeing pcie 5.0 on motherboards. So a gen 3 will be 2 gens behind. That is why they are cheap.
No there's really not. A 2tb sata costs almost the same as a 2tb nvme gen3.
@David Jones and gen 5 will be super expensive for not that noticeable of a gain lol. For gaming. If you are gaming a gen3 nvme is perfectly fine. If you are doing work stations stuff like editing that's different
@@mattalford3932 All new gen items are more expensive just like gen 3 over gen 2 and so on. So that is not a strong argument. Your same argument was used between HDD's and SSD' when they first came out. Look how that had drastically changed. Gen 4 prices have already dropped with the release of gen 5. So people should be upgrading to a minimum of gen 4 or get left in the dust. There is only like 1 year left of gen 3 relevance. While technology is getting smaller, programs are getting larger, and with ech evolution of pcie generations the speeds are increasing. Even between gen 3 and gen 4 ssds. My gen 3 ssd was never going to reach 8gb/s like my gen 4 does. 3gb/s was fast, but not nearly as fast as 8gb/s. And with "direct-storage" on the horizon gen 3 is not going to get you the preferred speeds like gen 4 and above will.
It's a bit odd, but my laptop Hynix PCIe 3.0 NVMe 1TB w/ RTX 3080 (mobile) is as fast as your top results.
Can't wait to see some DXVK benchmarks on this!
DXVK is DirectX 9-11, so it would be vkd3d, if you're talking about Linux. However, support will have to be added for DirectStorage, before it'll work as well, though I don't know exactly where it is on that front. Based on how these things usually go, there will need to be quite a few games using it, before someone wants it badly enough to go implement it. But with any luck, Valve could submit a patch for it, much sooner than these things have taken in the past. Either way, sooner or later, it will come.
Yea SATA SSDs aren't going anywhere fast, just like they said that HDDs time was up when SSDs became popular.
i doubt it'll kill off sata SSDs entirely, they may not be the best but they have a LOT of use and that can fill in and improve things still. They've already been displaced by NVME in devices that support them (or that have support added) for gaming and possibly some other things.
But killing off Sata SSDs means mechanical still fills in (there's always a need for mass storage), Sata SSD is one of the middlegrounds that (along with hybrid mechanical drives).
but realistically there is no way to tell, a lot of technologies that could of helped or of been put to use to better a generation died off.
Realistically all we need is that long overdue improvement to sata 3.0 And its not impossible, SAS proves it and would be realistic means for a upgrade for a minimal cost (basically just better chipsets and same parts in motherboards would make mechanical much more appealing than it is, and also Sata SSDs as they'd take advantage of it soon too)
What we're really seeing is how ssds are proving to be unreliable for long term and need to be improved. We have had a obsession with speed since they came out.
why no data showing DirectStorage on vs off? how are we supposed to see the performance uplift from DirectStorage without showing us the numbers with vs without?
Hmm ... Perhaps you meant WD Black 7,200RPM hard drive as the Blue models are typically, to my knowledge, 5400RPM drives.
If you're using a 7,200RPM drive, then the majority of hard drive users will see even slower results.
The BLue models do come in 7200 RPM varieties. There is a WD20EZBX and a
WD20EZAZ as examples. The EZBX is a 2TB 7200 RPM model while while the EZAZ is a 2TB 5400 RPM model. I'm going to assume that Gordon got the 7200RPM spec from MSI so unless MSI switched out drives on him he was actually working with a 7200RPM drive.
Blue is available at 7200 up to 2TB, as used here. 5400 is up to 6TB. BX vs AZ suffix. This would be a WD20EZBX.
@@rdspam Thanks for putting me right on that. I'd never seen a 7,200RPM Blue, other than the 640Gb I bought 12 years back,. Good to know they're still around :)
@@nanoflower1 I appreciate you correcting me on this. It's good to know the 7,200RPM option is still available on standard desktop drives :)
The end of sata ssds...
Hdd users: it's time to upgrade to sata ssds
What are the gen 4s like with DirectStorage off?
Thanks for the tip at the start to show how to find out if it's supported, looks like I've got 2 drives that support it. But how do we activate it?
At 28:20 why did the HDD game have up to 20 fps more than when it was loaded from Direct Storage?
It's loading the GPU up so you will lose frames from that, personally I'd rather wait an extra 10s for it to load and keep all my frames and the hit could be much bigger on cards below the 4090 but this game is a shitshow so it might just be down to that in the end.
@mintydog06 I think you got the timestamp wrong.
@@pf100andahalf Thanks, updated it. I put 30 instead of 20 :)
@@memitim171 So it's still doing the decompressing on the fly there? I thought it was all done at the start when it loaded in about a second
@@mintydog06 It's highly unlikely to be doing nothing, most games like this will stream assets in on the fly so it can theoretically drop your framerate if it's passing some of that work to the GPU.
I've just tried the demo of Forspoken and I can't see the benchmark there. Did some fiddling from a 980 Pro 2Tb and shuffled it to my other Sabrent RocketQ 1tb (QLC, but not a slow drive in reads by any means as it's 3400mb/s) and on a B550 board.. I can't tell the difference of loading from one to another unless I grab a stopwatch and see that the game maybe loads a tiny little less faster. I haven't tried yet from my other Crucial MX500.
To be honest Sata SSDs doesn't seem so garbage to load even DS games off from them.
I would have been much more interested to see comparison numbers using a more budget GPU, like a mid tier 3070/4070 or something, most gamers are not running a 4090, but maybe the results are strictly linear, idk. Wouldhave been nice to know.
For the casual player, it is a waste of money. That is more and more becoming the market.
@OMEGA LOL Information Bios. You think that is people want because that is all they talk about because it get viewers.
@OMEGA LOL Ok then how many Mini PCs do they make?
no, if you read/write at max sata speeds like cross-point (x-point) does, 600MB/s random access Q1 speeds, point at the cross, not at the people, you judges
Should have tested on a P5800X to see just where things could be in another 10-15 years.
It's an interesting benchmark, for sure, but the more interesting impact will be when you start talking about asset streaming with DirectStorage; how much of an FPS impact will that eventually lead to.
Shorter load times are definitely great, but as presented, even the difference *with* DirectStorage is only on the order of a few seconds here and there.
28:15 the fps looks better on Sata Hdd then Nvme
Any decent Gen 3.0 NVMe drive is doing
3570 MB/s
2298 MB/s
745 MB/s
49 MB/s
This was my old Samsung 970 EVO running same benchmark as yours.
that's mostly the same as 960 pro
Which is much faster than the third gen nvme they tested.
Now we need all the games to implement this feature. So far only Forspoken has that feature right?
I wanna see what one of Intel's PCIe 4.0 3DXpoint drives would've done for DirectStorage.
Really good tests, thanks for puttiing in the work, it's itneresting to see the differences between SATA, Gen3 and Gen4 SSDs, as well as Host Bust SSDs and ones with DRAM cache, and QLC vs TLC, shows that there are technical performance differences.
Started unofficially in Halo Infinite campaign, also nvidia shader cache does exactly that for a while now
Spinners are for NAS storage
@22:04 note the early generation SSD drives are about as fast as the top of the line mechanical HDD at 7200 rpm. This is consistent with what earlier consumers found, that at best solid state drives were roughly 2x of the mechanical hard drive, at best, and often about the same in real world performance. Once again, you've been had if you try and follow the consumer electronics hype, which is geared towards making gullible consumers like you BUY, BUY, BUY. That said, to impress my girl, I got her a state of the art laptop recently. What I've noticed is that often the people who do real work, and that includes programmers, often work on out-of-date hardware, or at least not bleeding edge. Gamers and women and people who are into signaling are the drivers of buying the latest cutting edge stuff.
Writing this from a 12 year old laptop I got for $100 on eBay, and for my needs, it works fine. Cuz i'm a boss...
And even the red bar for the first scene in the complex testing game "Forspoken" shows that an earlier gen SSD is only about 2.5x faster than a mechanical HDD (6.5/2.55 avg. time in seconds = 2.54x ratio)
NPCWorld shilling crap we don't need? Imagine my shock!
Why does my c drive say supported but my game nvme 980 pro say bypassio not supported due to driver ntfs.sys
Up to 9.68GB of 4.0x4 and 3.84TB of 3.0x4 storage now (plus 3 hard drives). I see 11.5GB/s on the 3.0, 15.5/17.5 on the other 2 drives.
oh NO what I must do, 2 seconds is too much
What I'm wondering is will this fix the stuttering that plagues most modern PC games? It does seem like its asset rendering stuttering most of the time...
I would've like to have seen AMD StoreMi compared to DirectStorage load times and bandwidth numbers.
Why are the choices for gen 3 nvme under spec? They are running at about pcie 2 speeds. My samsung 970 evo plus can do 3700mb/s read.
I'm guessing it's what he had to hand, I did expect to see more of Samsung's EVO drives in there considering their massive popularity.
Sure it'll be faster, but will it increase heat even more to the hardware?
Not bad but you forgot to test everything with DirectStorage OFF. How do we know the uplift isn’t just from the interface and bandwidths of the drives?
Indeed, I was just thinking that...what is the baseline?
*the number we ACTUALLY need...*
Load times are important, but we really need to see where the cutoff is before you get STUTTER in-game because textures can't load in fast enough. That will vary by the game. If a slower SSD works fine in-game but just loads in six seconds instead of two seconds I'm certainly not spending more money for the fast SSD (or worse upgrading my motherboard etc just for a faster SSD). In my other post I also recommend that games are flexible so they can copy from slow to fast SSD or system memory so you don't need to have the game installed to a fast SSD in theory... if I had Windows 11 on a fast, 512GB SSD (i.e. 8GBps) then maybe I want the ability to dedicate 200GB as the Direct Storage game buffer (and FAST RESUME when that comes to PC) rather than buy another 1TB SSD just so I can install Direct Storage games to it. Or worse, buy the expensive, fast SSD and only have a couple games that even need Direct Storage.
games will be designed and tested around specific target technology, so it's more of "when will developer start ignoring users that don't have direct storage"
Think of current games that will stutter on mechanical drives because they didn't bother with access patterns (because it matters so little with SSDs)
Why is the MSI Drive at the top of the Crystal Disk mark chart? Seems like its worse in every metric compared to the SK Hynix? Did they pay for that spot?