Next generation gaming on both the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation are technically the best and most advanced gaming devices ever to hit the market. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 offered a gaming experience like no other when they made the announcement of a certain storage technology that changed the gaming industry. It allowed the hardware to fully access all the speed offered by a 4th generation SSD storage.
In theory, the new technology allowed full access to the 5GB/s read speeds that the new SSDs are capable of. That much read speeds also means that loading times in games are cut short to nearly an instant. For games that was introduced on PS5 like “Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart”, it means no loading screens from one map to another. In that sense, developers are given more freedom to design games that has nearly no loading screens. That technology alone put the next-generation consoles ahead of even the most powerful gaming PCs you can find today.
Microsoft did make an announcement 18 months ago that that same DirectStorage technology on the Xbox Series X will make it to Windows games. That 18-month waiting time has laboured its final fruits. Microsoft has just announced that the DirectStorage API is here for Windows games.
This announcement also means that games for Windows 10 and Windows 11 now get full access to the full 5GB/s the 4th Generation PCIe NVMe Solid State Drives. Technically, if SSDs gets faster in these few years, DirectStorage technology should also mean that whatever speeds SSDs can go to, games have access to as well. In that sense, it means loading times in PC games are not just greatly reduced, it could be eliminated.
There is a problem here. While Microsoft says that Windows 10 and 11 are ready for games with no loading screens, we will not be getting any games without loading times though. The reality is this, the marker is still full of games that are optimised for HDD speeds. That also means that even if your SSD can be read at 5GB/s, games today are not made to take advantage of those speeds yet.
The way things look, it looks like we also will not be getting any games that would be made to take advantage of those speeds anytime too soon too. HDDs are still a thing in the PC market. It is the cheapest way to set up a gaming PC today still, at the same time too, PCIe NVMe 4.0 SSDs are not the cheapest storage options available at this time. Still, if game developers are paying attention, they will make more games like the upcoming “Forspoken”. For now, while this announcement may not be much too significant currently, it could mean a future where games can feel seamless all the time.