Now, developers have a better solution. NVIDIA collaborated with Microsoft and IHV partners to develop GDeflate for DirectStorage 1.1, an open standard for GPU compression. The current Game Ready Driver (version 526.47) contains NVIDIA RTX IO technology, including optimizations for GDeflate. GDeflate: An Open GPU Compression Standard Storage Device: DirectStorage enabled games will work on all devices (. You’ll need an NVMe SSD, where the bandwidth capabilities are much higher and the storage media itself is faster, to see the significant improvements of DirectStorage. We highly recommend ensuring your game files are saved to an NVMe to get the best gaming experience.

This two-level parallelization strategy enables GDeflate implementations to scale easily across a wide range of data-parallel architectures, also providing necessary headroom for supporting future, even wider data-parallel machines without compromising decompression performance. NVIDIA RTX IO supports DirectStorage 1.1 Due to the additional graphics features added to the PC port, on top of the game's already great visuals, the game's system requirements are quite beefy. The game requires up to a RTX 4080 if you want to max out the game's visuals at 4K. What we need is a GPU-friendly data compression approach that can scale performance as GPUs become wider and more parallel. The technology this game boasts has always confused me. It simply looks like a more advanced version of portals or non-contiguous zone transitions found in older game engines. I know I've seen this sort of shifting in UT2004 and HL2 maps, although a much more primitive version of it based off scripted events or static boundaries. No DirectStorage required.The difference I believe, is how they're filling memory. Older techniques would essentially have two levels in memory at any given time. That way you could switch immediately, by just teleporting the player, at the cost of cutting your maximum level size in half. Insomniac appears to be switching between full-scale 10-12gb levels on a console with only 16gb of memory. Which means they only have one level in memory at a time. Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/news/directstorage-on-intel-gpus.htmlNVIDIA: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/accelerating-load-times-for-directx-games-and-apps-with-gdeflate-for-directstorage/

Time Zero focuses on restorative care to create balance in a soothing space where no focus is on achievement. This break involves: When released, we will provide an update to the DirectStorage SDK that provides everything developers need to get started with GPU decompression. Included with the SDK will be:In Windows 11, overlapped execution between DirectStorage and application command queues is fully expected. Make sure to measure the impact that different resource types have on compression savings and GPU decompression performance. What Insomniac was probably trying to convey is they could load whole levels instantly, while in game, without the use of speed bumps. But even then, open world games have basically solved this problem without the need for super fast storage. There may be some cases where GPU decompression isn’t desirable. To globally disable GPU decompression, set the DisableGpuDecompression field in DSTORAGE_CONFIGURATION to TRUE. Games may wish to provide this option to users as a performance setting, in case they are running on a system that maybe has a significantly faster CPU than GPU. Knowledge of how GDeflate works can inform decisions about appropriate stream sizes. First, GDeflate splits the uncompressed stream into 64 KiB-sized tiles. Each tile is compressed separately. This provides the first level of parallelism – for CPU decompression, each tile can be decompressed by a different thread, and for GPU decompression, each tile can be decompressed by a single thread group. For the second level of parallelism, GDeflate arranges the data within a tile so that multiple lanes within a thread group can work in parallel on decompressing that tile.

High-performance systems have long embraced large-scale data parallelism to continue scaling performance for many applications. On the other hand, parallelizing the traditional data compression algorithms has been challenging, due to fundamental serial assumptions “baked” into their design. Custom NVME SSD: The foundation of the Xbox Velocity Architecture is our custom, 1TB NVME SSD, delivering 2.4 GB/s of raw I/O throughput, more than 40x the throughput of Xbox One. Traditional SSDs used in PCs often reduce performance as thermals increase or while performing drive maintenance. The custom NVME SSD in Xbox Series X is designed for consistent, sustained performance as opposed to peak performance. Developers have a guaranteed level of I/O performance at all times and they can reliably design and optimize their games removing the barriers and constraints they have to work around today. This same level of consistent, sustained performance also applies to the Seagate Expandable Storage Card ensuring you have the exact same gameplay experience regardless of where the game resides.Also, 64 KB happens to be the standard tile size for tiled or sparse resources in graphics APIs (DirectX and Vulkan), which makes GDeflate compatible with future on-demand streaming architectures leveraging these API features.

All threads in the SIMD group share the decompression state. The formatting of the bitstream is carefully constructed to enable highly optimized cooperative processing of compressed data. A: DangerZone appears to generate most of their geometry on the fly a la Minecraft. While this is impressive, certainly, it isn't at all comparable to loading data from the disk. CPUs (even Intel Core 2 Duos) can spin out meshes faster than even most SSDs can, let alone hard disks. In Windows 10, command queue scheduling contention can occur between DirectStorage copy and compute command queues, and application-managed copy and compute command queues.A key takeaway from this is the 64 KiB tile size. If a choice has to be made about whether or not to split some data into multiple streams – for example, whether or not to use a DSTORAGE_DESTINATION_TEXTURE_REGION or DSTORAGE_DESTINATION_MULTIPLE_SUBRESOURCES request – then understanding the tile size can help guide this decision. Surprisingly, the storage requirements are quite decent for a game featuring GPU decompression support. The minimum requirement doesn't even demand an SSD (though the developers do recommend one), requiring just 75GB of hard drive space if you have it. But if you want to play the game at anything higher than low-quality settings, the system requirements suggest that you upgrade to an SSD to do so. New DirectStorage API: Standard File I/O APIs were developed more than 30 years ago and are virtually unchanged while storage technology has made significant advancements since then. As we analyzed game data access patterns as well as the latest hardware advancements with SSD technology, we knew we needed to advance the state of the art to put more control in the hands of developers. We added a brand new DirectStorage API to the DirectX family, providing developers with fine grain control of their I/O operations empowering them to establish multiple I/O queues, prioritization and minimizing I/O latency. These direct, low level access APIs ensure developers will be able to take full advantage of the raw I/O performance afforded by the hardware, resulting in virtually eliminating load times or fast travel systems that are just that . . . fast. This won’t have a significant effect on end-to-end throughput. However, it may result in variation in latency when delivering the resource contents to their final locations. If a game wishes to have more control over exactly how CPU decompression is performed – integrating with its own job system perhaps, then DSTORAGE_DISABLE_BUILTIN_CPU_DECOMPRESSION, can be specified for NumBuiltInCpuDecompressThreads. When configured in this way, DirectStorage will no longer perform CPU decompression itself. Instead, the title can use the custom decompression queue with the DSTORAGE_GET_REQUEST_FLAG_SELECT_BUILTIN flag to collect decompression work. The game can use the same codec mentioned above to decompress the data, or it can plug in its own GDeflate decompression implementation if it wishes. Forcing CPU Decompression