As one of the few current-gen-only titles known to be in development, it is natural for Forspoken to utilize modern rendering features and technological advances such as AMD FSR 2.0. However, it is also the first officially announced game to make use of the DirectStorage API on PC.
This feature might ring a bell and that’s because the Xbox Series X/S launched with DirectStorage support in November 2020. It is Microsoft’s custom storage solution that is meant to circumvent bottlenecks with loading and streaming data such as bandwidth and CPU limitations.
Factors such as drive speed aren’t the only ones that influence how quickly a game loads or how much data it can stream. The CPU is also used to decompress that data, which is where DirectStorage comes in.
With Microsoft’s custom storage API, data is decompressed on the GPU. This allows for higher bandwidth data to be streamed much more quickly, while also lightening the load on the CPU. When utilized properly, DirectStorage is able to take better advantage of an NVMe SSD’s max potential without something along the chain weighing it down.
Although DirectStorage support officially launched on PC almost two weeks ago, Forspoken is currently the only confirmed title set to make use of it. Currently slated for October 11, perhaps we can expect more games to support it as the cross-gen period comes to an end.
