Forspoken developer says 1-second game loads are now a temporary reality on PC

Last Monday, Microsoft said DirectStorage would usher in “a new era of fast loading times and detailed worlds in PC games.” And while that now seems pretty big, he’s the developer of the upcoming tech show game speak It now claims that 1-second load times are within easy reach.

Speaking at GDC 2022 about the technology included in the PC version of the game, Luminous Productions’ CTO Teppei Ono says the Square Enix title will actually load some scenes in a second, provided your Windows 11 PC has an NVMe SSD capable drive At more than 5000 MB / sec it reads.

A loading time of 1 second wasn’t the case for all scenes, and it didn’t show us which scenes were loading in that amount of time – instead, we saw samples of the scenes and gameplay. speak It took 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds and 2.2 seconds to get there, thanks to how DirectStorage offloads graphics assets streaming from the CPU to the GPU.

Please forgive the poor quality of these GDC broadcast screenshots.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

You may be wondering if it is much faster than playing games Without direct storageAnd Ono admits the answer is actually no, not yet: While you’ll certainly see a massive speed boost from an SSD on a hard drive’s magnetic spin platters, and from an NVMe SSD on a slower SATA drive, the current implementation of DirectStorage formatted speak It just removes one of the big I/O bottlenecks – some are on the CPU.

And if you’re hoping that DirectStorage will improve performance with hard drives that rotate regularly, the answer isn’t yet: “HDDs don’t achieve the expected result due to hardware performance limitations,” Ono says.

Times are about the same for hard drives with and without DirectStorage.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Amazing load times on SATA and M.2, but not significantly different.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

But, says Ono, “I/O is no longer a bottleneck for load times” — DirectStorage’s data transfer speeds are clearly faster for SSDs, and could improve in the future. Decompress the GPU resource.

Look at that massive jump in I/O; Too bad we don’t see much in the game yet.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

In general, he says, most PC games don’t benefit from a fast NVMe SSD as much as they do speak, claiming that load times for most games are over 10 seconds. In my experience, the fastest load times I’ve seen were on Final Fantasy VII Intergrade Remake On the PS5, which can take just 10 seconds from leaving the PS5 home screen to being able to move your character, it’s four to five times faster than on the PS4. It is not clear whether speak Calculate the launch of the application to play the game or not.

With speakOno says they also use other techniques to speed up loading times, such as preloading the game while you’re at the title screen.

AMD was also revealed today this speak FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 will support time-scaling for higher effective resolutions or faster frame rates, which the team says took less than a week to integrate into the game.