Originally developed for Xbox X/S, Microsoft introduced DirectStorage for Windows PC gaming on 2025-04-10. Microsoft has since released two updated versions, DirectStorage 1.1 and DirectStorage 1.2 on November 7th, 2022 and April 18th, 2023 as well.
It is an API (Application Programming Interface) that improves game performance by massively decreasing the load time of game assets. However, all systems and all games do not support this process.
DirectStorage—An Overview
Microsoft introduced DirectStorage todecrease the CPU usageand loading time of PC and Xbox console games.
All modern games have optimized the process of loading their assets by breaking them into chunks. However, this process creates the need to request and load the assets every time, vastly increasing the input/output (IO) requests. With older hard drives, this process could not be optimized any further due to the low bandwidth in such drives.
It is now possible with the NVMe technology, but the older Win32 APIs were still causing bottlenecks. These general-purpose APIs require more CPU cycles and could not keep up with the IO bandwidth provided by NVMe drives.
So Microsoft designed the DirectStorage API to utilize the full IO throughput of these drives and efficiently load high-quality graphics assets. After the initial release, Microsoft continued integrating more advanced features into this API to exploit the capability of DirectX 12 Ultimate compatible GPUs.
How Does DirectStorage Work?
With its first PC release (version 1.0), DirectStorage introduced two features:
DirectStorage can handle smaller requests in batches more efficiently. It uses the improved file IO stack of the Windows 11 operating system to reduce CPU overhead.
Additionally, along with the high IO bandwidth of NVMe drives, it uses the extra CPU overhead to perform even more IO operations. This way, the games can load the necessary assets much faster.
The DirectStorage 1.1 release introducedGPU decompressioninto its list of features.
Modern games mostly use compressed assets as uncompressed ones take up a lot of space. These assets first go to the RAM (system memory). Then, traditionally, the CPU decompresses them and transfers them to the GPU’s VRAM. DirectStorage 1.1 allows the GPU to do this task instead, as it is more optimized for parallel processing. This process further brings down the load time.
DirectStorage 1.2 didn’t bring many further improvements to the API’s operation. But it did fix some bugs and introduce some features to make the API more accessible to developers.
