Devs: windows direct storage

[thomasbkdk]

If the devs are looking
Is the new feature in windows 10/11 'direct storage' something that is being considered for X4?

[Imperial Good]

Is the new feature in windows 10/11 'direct storage' something that is being considered for X4?

The main issue with DirectStorage is the API is not cross platform and not designed to interoperate with Vulkan. This would mean that only Windows users would benefit from a DirectStorage backend and that the main benefit of DirectStorage, to efficiently move buffer data from storage to VRAM, is not possible.

Using DirectStorage efficiently is also non-trivial since all buffer data file formats require being designs with DirectStorage usage in mind. Specifically small read requests should be avoided and that the stored buffer data must be in a format that the API can process efficiently.

DirectStorage also does not offer any noteworthy benefit to slower NVMe and AHCI devices. Such devices read so slowly that the bottleneck remains the device itself with even older or slower API overhead being minimal.

I am currently not aware of any cross-platform alternative being created.

[thomasbkdk]

Okay, thank you for explaining.

Then buying one of the newest fastest nvme ssd's does not make sence, in regards to speeding up this game (now or later).

[Tempest]

what we need for X4 is a Quad-Core CPU that can do 10GHz baseclock on all cores.

Direct Storage is supported by exactly ZERO games at the moment by the way, in the end, the boon would be: asset loading speed. AMD is up to similar things: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/smart-access-memory although you need to pair up a CPU with their own GPU (Zen + RDNA)

[Imperial Good]

Then buying one of the newest fastest nvme ssd's does not make sence, in regards to speeding up this game (now or later).

Loading times and performance are mostly bottlenecked by the complex state of the universe rather than I/O speed. I would strongly recommend a decent SSD to play X4 on as there is a significant benefit over a mechanical drive, but the difference in performance between even a decent SATA SSD and a decent PCIe NVMe SSD is largely imperceptible.

A lot of the benefits of DirectStorage are with CPU time and latency reduction of reads rather than throughput. This is most relevant to systems with slow or few CPU cores where asset I/O can take significant processing resources, such as the Xbox series consoles or older CPUs. The latency advantage of DirectStorage is something that helps a bit but does not really change anything unless the game is specifically built to depend on it.

[Raevyan]

Okay, thank you for explaining.

Then buying one of the newest fastest nvme ssd's does not make sence, in regards to speeding up this game (now or later).

If it helps you, I can confirm that there is basically zero difference in loading times using a Samsung 870 evo sata ssd or using a Samsung 980 pro pcie4 nvme.