@@TechTesters Thank you for your testing of DS and also the ending where you warn potential buyers of NVMe to wait until this technology become more mature and common among games before they make decision based on purchasing a more expensive NVMe SSD only for games that support that. I would like to know more about how much space did you need to reserve on NVMe SSDs for this game as you didn't mention it in your benchmark? Is it possible that those issues that players of this game experience with sometimes very low frames is related to how devs have implemented this technology even on RTX 4080 or better cards? When playing demo of this game on my 4670K+GTX 970 (only 4GB VRAM) and with SSD for all storage (16GB DDR3 RAM). I could get some what playable frame rates with upscaling (and going down to 1920 x 1440 from my 3440 x 1440 resolution). If you would later make a more in depth benchmark of DS could you also look at how it scales with: (A) PCI express generation - motherboard chipset, GPU (from 3.0 and up to 5.0) (B) How different amount of space on SSD impact performance (as in the more full any SSD become, does it also change performance in game)? (C) What impact does amount of VRAM have on DS as I have bought an 4070 TI which have only 12 GB. Will that be enough or is this technology pushing people to buy ONLY RTX 4090 with 24 GB VRAM (on AMD 7900XTX with 24 GB or XT with 20 GB VRAM). Thank you for your good work!
I am so glad you pointed out the fact that these results are tied in with a VERY high-end (literally the highest at the moment) CPU/GPU system. As you said these small FPS gains seen here with the "faster" (much) more expensive NVMe SSDs are probably even smaller (to non-existent) when using mid-high or lower tier CPU/GPU systems.
The devs have in the past said they're using DirectStorage 1.0, which lacks the GPU Decompression aspect of Direct Storage. The game might ship with a v1.1 DLL file but it's not using all its features.
This game was kind of a let down but the tech is definitely promising. Complex and bigger game worlds fully utilizing gen 5 ssds. Definitely makes me excited for future development potential and the upcoming ssds seem more appealing now.
Bought an SN850X 2TB on your recommendation and super-happy with it. Best-in-class performance now that will age perfectly as direct storage becomes more common, and at a really good price. Cheers
i just bought a 980 pro they are the same price idk which is better hopefully this 980 pro is good because my last one just died only after 1 year it was a TeamGROUP T-CREATE
Nice review! I think DirectStorage will be more useful in the future when games get even bigger with for example 8k resolution textures, 32gb VRAM GPU's etc.
@@B0BBYGAMER for free, with 4090 in test bench. With 1060 it would have been 0~1fps. In one game, and one game only. Game that came out riddled with codding issues. But please, go forth and assume that direct STORAGE increases fps. You probably buy exclusively "gaming" branded stuff.
@@Ludak021 Did you even watch the video? 83 vs 75 FPS or 10.7% difference in the same game with the same SSD. If it scales the same with every GPU I don't think anyone is going to complain about getting ~10% more FPS. And your argument "it's only in one game" is moot because every new Xbox game developed, most of which will come to PC as well, will be implementing this technology (and ofcourse Windows-only games can use it also).
Nice coverage Nada! Very cool that you and the rest of the team got this testing done so quick! Looking forward to seeing what DirectStorage might enable in the future! I'm looking forward to that fully open-world, no loading screens future 😁
Horizon Zero Dawn (PC) was the first game I encountered where an SSD install was a must. A 20% improvement on 1% lows when compared to an HDD install, and no micro stutters wile playing.
Same thing for me. Had horizon on a HDD and at some point there where a lot of stutters. Even in the benchmark there was a lot of major poppin. Maybe the drive was at its last, but since i got a 970 evo it plays smoothly.
Woah this is wholesome I learned something new, Love the diagram explaining how the data is storaged in SSD then readed by the memory then to cpu decompress, love it. But yeah I didn't know about the Direct Storage part skipping the cpu and getting straight to the memory to GPU Maybe thats why I have terribles 1% low fps on my old SSD, I have a gtx 1060 paired with ryzen 5 1600, even if I push 60fps on this tweaked system, I have terribles 1% fps low. on modern games that are not even triple AAA Cheers, thanks for the video♥
Hello, learning is very easy on your videos due to the very clear communication you present. I enjoyed this one and it will affect my next SSD purchase decision, thanks.
As always an amazing, complete and in depth analisys, I've discovered your channel recently and I wish I did sooner. Would have appreciated a run win a lower gen GPU with the HDD and the SN850X to see the difference there, but huge compliments nevertheless.
Very intriguing review and comparison. I was not expecting the FPS difference. It will be interesting to see if more game titles adopt direct storage. Thank you for the analysis video!
It really makes sense for open-world games where assets are getting loaded in all the time. A game like Oblivion would run like a dream with this tech!
@@Xfade81 Nowadays the hardware can compensate just fine, but Oblivion had and still has a large game world that's notorious for completely stopping the game to load the next cell of the map, not to mention you first encounter a loading screen before entering any building. I'm just saying, a game like that could've benefitted.
If larger capacity SSDs are faster than smaller capacity SSDs, when does this reach a point of diminishing returns ie. 1 TB vs 4 TB, and how much more FPS would a larger capacity give you in this game?
The effect is definitely way less noticeable on drives above 1tb Not sure at what point it stops scaling. Would probably also depend on specific workload to some degree
@@ironeleven This is indeed how it works and with a shift to higher density memory chips every couple generations the capacity where performance lift is most likely to be noticed will rise. Like if 1TB is the threshold for them to start using 2 memory chips than that's when you'll notice the performance jump but if density improves to the point of only needing 1 memory chip to reach 1TB capacity than you'll need a drive with greater than 1TB to see the jump in performance.
Thanks for covering this. Next time you do DirectStorage benchmarking I'd love it if you could include frametime performance graphs in favour of the traditional AVG FPS + 1% Low chart. Ultimately I think what we're looking for is a reduction of frametime spikes (stutters) when game assets are loading in, and a frametime graph will showcase that perfectly.
Yup, I think that's exactly it. And I think it's because the game just isn't pre-loading game data properly and relying on DS to make up for bad programming and resource management.
@@TechTesters It would be super cool if you did frame time plots. They're quite useful but they're also quite rare. You could also consider doing metrics like "time spent above 16ms" or other similar things to make them easier to understand.
@@TechTesters As I watch your channel more and more, I am ever more impressed with the graphs you present showing test results. I can appreciate the amount of testing and other work you put in to supply results.
So many games have heavy asset streaming these days. Yet no one is actually benchmarking SSD performance in them. I think having a faster gen 4 SSD with dram crash actually improves performance in modern games. I would love to see more testing done in more asset streaming heavy games like Starfield, Jedi Survivor, Immortals of Aveum, Alan Wake 2 ECT. There has to be a reason that I get better performance than benchmarks using the same GPU as mine with an equal or better CPU. I think good dram cache could be a part of it, allowing assets to be located and streamed out faster. This is the only video I've found even looking at SSD performance in modern games.
Thanks for the tests. I'd say that frame time graphs would be able to shed more light on the FPS behaviour. My guess is that most of the time frame rate is the same regardless of the drive. The question is whether the frame rate dips are random or concentrated. If they are concentrated, that won't be much of an issue. Averages won't convey this.
Pretty glad I picked up the SN850X 2TB (on sale at microcenter) after watching a couple of your other NVME SSD videos. This thing is blazing fast and didn't break my wallet for the 2TB version.
Thanks for another good tech review. I hope it follows up with more testing on the matter- AMD SAM on\off, VRAM size, like you mentioned different GPU\CPU "horsepower". Just 2-3 examples would suffice I guess. Also trying blue vs red team. Oh and ofc 5800x3D.
Forza Motorsport on PC would be the next BIG game release using Direct Storage. Would be nice to see a video on it, when paired with the latest Gen 5 drives.
Direct Storage is a future solution imo which isn’t much relevant for at least another year or two when its more mainstream. I currently have a couple mid range Gen4, 5x mid/high end Gen3 and a number of higher end SATA SSD drives and tbh a couple seconds of occasional loading is nothing to worry about imo. On another note, between ram / cpu / GPU and now storage tweaking ….. a few % improvement on each of these can easily equate to a generational pc upgrade or performance tier increase which is impressive as many will benefit from this. It’s interesting to see what the future holds.
Normally yes. It will take a while for something cutting edge to come along and be any good. DS however is not a massive overhaul and it alleviates of one of the main bottlenecks: slow storage. Or better said, bypasses some of the emulation layers and cpu intervention. It has been demo'd to be more than just a few seconds faster in loads, it can almost instantly load up large datasets using DirectFlash, a winning combo, and DirectFlash is what will take years, sadly.
Feel like it'd make a bigger difference at higher FPS numbers where the CPU is more of a bottleneck. Perhaps should have texted at lower settings and 1080p
the forstPoken game uses DirectStorage BUT was developed with a version that did not implement direct decompression via GPU. Or the main feature of DirectStorage.
Thanks Nada, I'd love to see a test of ReFS performance on various desktop storage as I've been building myself NVME mirrored storage spaces for my data and games in a work/game pc and getting a comparison of where I can see an increase and on what types of storage it makes a difference would be cool!
A video showing Cache size benefits would be an excellent topic. Many gamers play car and plane simulators. A review of controllers they might use would be informative.
People need to understand that, regardless of the API used (even though it can play a significant role, detrimental even in some cases), what is equally important FOR GAMES is the 4K random READ speeds of a drive, because this reduces stuttering when games are streaming assets to RAM and VRAM and combined with with low latency RAM (and of course a fast CPU to make the decompression or at least handle the interrupts for handshakes in the case of DS), you will be getting the best in terms of consistent frame times which is absurdly more important than just pushing more and more frames, frame consistency, is, and will almost always be the KING as long as you can hit the FPS target you need, not like, need, huge distinction which a lot people don't case but should. Another reason as to why the 4K random READ speeds (and sequential as well but to way less extend for SSDs at least) of any drive is what matters most is this, because that's what a gamer uses a drive filled with games for MOST of the time, because remember, you install the game once, so it's kinda ok to take more 1-30 mins more for a game to install but play perfectly consistently because the driver has faster read speeds than writes. Edit: Seriously, not even the amount of DRAM used on almost all drives will help much if the assets need to be red again and again from the last layer of the storage's NAND memoery (DRAM>SLC>MLC>TLC>QLC and some don't have the first two, in fact most low and mid range don't) unless the game is coded for a very specific hardware and/or there is an amazing scheduler on the drive and can take which data is used often enough to keep them in the dram but most drives don't have big enough DRAMs anyway, biggest i've seen was 2GB on like on an 980 2TB i think and they scale it with the disk's capacity so it's another reason why DRAM matter even less as you go down in capacity. Here's another major TIP most people don't know. If you are using a drive for the system and games AT THE SAME TIME you NEED an NVME drive with DRAM caching because, the NVME protocol, unlike SATA and M.2 SATA, is the only one which is bidirectional. This can be a huge deal and will allow for less stuttering in games because an NVME drive can read and write at the same time especially with a DRAM, and you bet your lovely a** that the system/OS is gonna use the drive to write something while you are gaming which is why you NEED an NVME in that case especially if you are playing games which are doing constant and/or intensive texture /streaming. SATA-based drives cannot do this, also, SAS can but they are mostly for servers.
Some system manager/protection type 3rd party products prevents direct storage to work. Those have file filter drivers which interrupt direct data flow.
The statement at the start about faster storage USUALLY being very very small is a big qualifier. Some games storage matters a lot for. Star Citizen absolutely hammers the CPU, RAM and Storage with all the I/O. One of the few cases where the now discontinued and expensive Optane drives actually put in work. And recent total war titles like Total Warhammer 3, loading time differences for the campaign map are very significant. Also worth adding that DirectStorage is a DX12 feature. Devs making games with Vulkan can implement this stuff on their own, it just won't be called DirectStorage. Would be interesting to see an Optane drive or even a ramdisk in comparison to the pcie 4 m.2s. And worth pointing out dram and dramless SSDs in the benchmark and explaining the difference, and talking about system page files stored on the SSD and it's relation to RAM. But that last bit strays a bit from DirectStorage topic.
I imagine it’s not everyday case but I’d love to see your test also when MOBO is packed to max with RAM and part of it is used for ramdisk for game - and then compare fastest SSD and ramdisk. ;) Thanks for interesting benchmark!
Yes there is only one PC game with Direct Storage. It's impossible to get any real conclusion right now of how it performs in games and with different setups. An interesting video, thanks.
I'm confident SATA SSDs will be a viable option even for high end systems for still few years in the future. I'm still using the Samsung 850 EVO for storing games. the direct storage games can be installed in the primary SSD which is nvme for most people while anything else can be launched from SATA SSD.
I'm surprised there is a notable difference between Gen3 and Gen4! Did anyone do a comparison between DirectStorage on/off, e.g. by using Win11/10 or removing the direct storage dll file? Is the benefit from DirectStorage similar to that of going from Gen3 to Gen4?
@Techtesters Does it make a difference, if the windows partition is on a 3.0 M2 and the game on a 4.0 M2? (does the game with direct storage have to be on the OS drive?) Great content
I never thought upgrading SSD would have a noticeable improvement. From a SATA SSD(MX500) to NVME (SN850x) was an amazing improvement. It wasn't the difference in specific performance, but the overall gains across the board that impressed. I would highly recommend trying to find an NVME SSD for anyone who has a compatible mobo, wait for them to go on sale, I snagged my sn850x(w/ heatsink) on sale for $155+ $20 shipping.
Hopefully they do some "way more testing" with the gen5's. I have a feeling this video was made a while ago but not finished or uploaded for a while and also maybe waited till Intel and AMD both had gen5 options.
Still not regretting only have Sata drives in my PC, but it does look like the gaming industry is finally going to start moving in the direction of making use of faster storage (on PC, since consoles already doing somewhat nicely with this.) Also if Square Enix are getting performance out of it in a PC port, then you gotta assume some of the slightly better PC developers out there can probably do more... WIll also be interesting to see games start using GPU decompression and how that'll impact performance. I'll probably look to grabbing one around the sales at the end of the year (unless I spot something reasonably priced before then.) Will definitely want one when Star Citizen eventually implements something like RTX-IO or whatever the Vulkan version of Direct Storage ends up being called (though that's likely to be a while off.)
huh. Interesting that it does affect FPS. I don't think it should happen, but the difference is bigger than what can be scoffed off as margin of error. Why though? Is it because it's trying to load assets directly from SSD to VRAM, hence making the SSD act like an extension of the VRAM? Very interesting to think about. Maybe a deeper dive to this would be appreciated.
Cool in terms of tech geekness (I am), but I wouldn't spend a second taking DirectStorage into consideration when picking a drive. Interesting video, thanks for sharing.
one thing to note is they have no generation requirements for this game so i think they use a very low bandwidth direct storage. would be intrestring to see when a game asks for say 2gb/s minimal or w/e.
I don't see that happening, at least not until this kind of technology has spread far enough that developers might change how loading assets is handled altogether. Maybe I'm missing aspects of this but at the moment you either get a loading screen, some sort of scalable transition area (like an elevator ride) or a fixed length corridor/sub-area that is used to hide the loading screen. Especially in the last case, you kind of have to determine a threshold of how fast or slow your players will load the data for any given area, and then design the transition appropriately. That being said, it would be kinda cool to see a game that has an option to replace these lengthy areas with much shorter ones for players with the necessary hardware.
I nearly doubled my fps in a number of games by switching from a Sabrent rocket q to an intel Optane drive. Seriously double fps! I saw this in new and old games, such as Mech warrior online and Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5 with ray tracing enabled. both struggled to get 45 fps and went to about 70- 90 fps after switching to optane. It blew me away how different it was.
Thanks for this video, thank you that you share your knowledge with us! Is there any possibility to see on your channel the relations of de/encoding of videos, as f.e. in Handbrake or similar software? What depend on speed fps etc? It would be great to see it on your channel! Thanks in advance for your efforts!
This is so valuable! Is there any chance that the stutters in games with shader compilation issues and other problems causing stutter could be slightly reduced with a faster SSD even if there‘s no Direct Storage involved? I‘m really tired of the massive stutters in some games, so I‘ll gladly take any benefit I can get no matter how small…
It can be different reason why you will experience "stutter" or "lag" as it can be that frames aren't rendered fast enough (GPU dependent) or CPU can't keep up with calculation that need to be done before it start to render next scene or object (CPU need also to process background task for anti-cheating and antivirus protection will also add into that chain and more and more games start to use anti-cheat apps as part of its operation). As far as I understand this tech it is meant to bypass CPU to process compressed material which instead are now going directly to GPUs processing. Shader Compilation is normally being done only once and then kept in storage until you change resolution or anything that will force an update of Shader. (Read link down here that explains I don't think DS will be able to change how Shader Compilation work at this stage as it would mean that games would have to be designed (as execution of Shaders then have to be run at GPU instead of CPU) and expect that end user also have this set up infrastructure for it to work with fast enough GPU for processing and enough powerful (fast) NVMe on their system to take advantage of this move. (Maybe one reason why games that have been ported from console like Forespoken have been using DS at this stage as infrastructure are more set in that environment - for PC gaming you have much larger variation for GPU, CPU and storage then on consoles like XBOX, PS etc). Here you can read more about what DS are meant to deal with:learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/system/overviews/directstorage/directstorage-overview It is important to understand that VRAM on GPU isn't the same as system RAM and that means that what stored in VRAM needs to be translated into GPUs API from CPU and that part creates an overhead.
Yes, those initial benchmarks were flawed because they included the framerates on the game's loading screens. The slower the drive, the more time spent on the loading screens, where framerates were super high, and the greater the boost to the overall framerates.
Glad i didn't make a mistake buying the WD SN870X instead of 2 990 pros I do plan to get a 990 pro but will be using that as my game drive and for OS will be the SN870x due to its fastest loading time and at the same time not worry too much regarding that whole firmware or health degrading issue going on with the 990 pro I heard its going on mostly with the ones installed in their OS drive and not game drive(secondary drive)
There's no differences because game need to read fast, but NVME only capable to write fast. It's useless, even pcie5 NVME also uselessness in term of 4K reading
I previously watched a 30 minute video on the subject that managed to have less info than this one in not even 9 minutes. Always standout quality.
pcworld PepeLaugh
Great video. Would love to see a follow up one testing more midrange setups.
Yo Jason, Awesome man
Hey! Thank you.
Definitely will do more testing! Just undecided about the direction atm.
@@TechTesters Thank you for your testing of DS and also the ending where you warn potential buyers of NVMe to wait until this technology become more mature and common among games before they make decision based on purchasing a more expensive NVMe SSD only for games that support that.
I would like to know more about how much space did you need to reserve on NVMe SSDs for this game as you didn't mention it in your benchmark? Is it possible that those issues that players of this game experience with sometimes very low frames is related to how devs have implemented this technology even on RTX 4080 or better cards?
When playing demo of this game on my 4670K+GTX 970 (only 4GB VRAM) and with SSD for all storage (16GB DDR3 RAM). I could get some what playable frame rates with upscaling (and going down to 1920 x 1440 from my 3440 x 1440 resolution).
If you would later make a more in depth benchmark of DS could you also look at how it scales with:
(A) PCI express generation - motherboard chipset, GPU (from 3.0 and up to 5.0)
(B) How different amount of space on SSD impact performance (as in the more full any SSD become, does it also change performance in game)?
(C) What impact does amount of VRAM have on DS as I have bought an 4070 TI which have only 12 GB. Will that be enough or is this technology pushing people to buy ONLY RTX 4090 with 24 GB VRAM (on AMD 7900XTX with 24 GB or XT with 20 GB VRAM).
Thank you for your good work!
hey bro, nice to see u there.. U've got a nice content too.... U not force to comment this vid u know, we know u already :D
I, too, would like to see more work done on this DirectStorage topic.
I am so glad you pointed out the fact that these results are tied in with a VERY high-end (literally the highest at the moment) CPU/GPU system. As you said these small FPS gains seen here with the "faster" (much) more expensive NVMe SSDs are probably even smaller (to non-existent) when using mid-high or lower tier CPU/GPU systems.
The devs have in the past said they're using DirectStorage 1.0, which lacks the GPU Decompression aspect of Direct Storage. The game might ship with a v1.1 DLL file but it's not using all its features.
There are definitely a lot of questions still. But the fps differences are still extremely interesting.
This game was kind of a let down but the tech is definitely promising. Complex and bigger game worlds fully utilizing gen 5 ssds. Definitely makes me excited for future development potential and the upcoming ssds seem more appealing now.
Then what decompress the game?!
:)
Gen 5 SSDs will be useless for the time being as no GPUs from NVidia, AMD or Intel support PCIe 5.0 at the moment.
@@Patrick73787 that's not how it works
Bought an SN850X 2TB on your recommendation and super-happy with it. Best-in-class performance now that will age perfectly as direct storage becomes more common, and at a really good price. Cheers
i just bought a 980 pro they are the same price idk which is better hopefully this 980 pro is good because my last one just died only after 1 year it was a TeamGROUP T-CREATE
@@Jefferson-kd6it the SN850X is faster for gaming and the 2TB is currently on half price sale (Amazon UK)
Exciting to finally see DirectStorage showing up. Hopefully we see more of it soon!
Excellent video as always!
Nice review! I think DirectStorage will be more useful in the future when games get even bigger with for example 8k resolution textures, 32gb VRAM GPU's etc.
I expect so!
When Esports moves to 4k 500hz standard basically..
Eyyy, this is what I asked for, a few months ago. Thanks for covering this !!
I love how you also tested the external I've been waiting for direct storage tests for ages!
I picked up a 4TB WD Black last week... This video made my Epeen grow. Thanks.
Hopefully DirectStorage will be implemented in more games soon.
Yeah this a eye opener 10 fps basically for free guess it's time to retire windows 10
RamDisk :O
@@B0BBYGAMER for free, with 4090 in test bench. With 1060 it would have been 0~1fps. In one game, and one game only. Game that came out riddled with codding issues. But please, go forth and assume that direct STORAGE increases fps. You probably buy exclusively "gaming" branded stuff.
@@Ludak021 Did you even watch the video? 83 vs 75 FPS or 10.7% difference in the same game with the same SSD. If it scales the same with every GPU I don't think anyone is going to complain about getting ~10% more FPS.
And your argument "it's only in one game" is moot because every new Xbox game developed, most of which will come to PC as well, will be implementing this technology (and ofcourse Windows-only games can use it also).
@@Ludak021 What on earth are you talking about??
Very promising indeed. Would really like to see the direction this tech going.
Nice coverage Nada! Very cool that you and the rest of the team got this testing done so quick! Looking forward to seeing what DirectStorage might enable in the future! I'm looking forward to that fully open-world, no loading screens future 😁
Awesome to see new tech making real improvements. So glad my Z690 board has 5 m.2 slots!
I love how you structure your videos. Most of the times you give more answer than I have questions for
Thats nice to hear 😊
Horizon Zero Dawn (PC) was the first game I encountered where an SSD install was a must. A 20% improvement on 1% lows when compared to an HDD install, and no micro stutters wile playing.
same here. pretty much all recent nixxes pc ports don't play well with hdds.
Same thing for me. Had horizon on a HDD and at some point there where a lot of stutters. Even in the benchmark there was a lot of major poppin. Maybe the drive was at its last, but since i got a 970 evo it plays smoothly.
@@MrAlexander100 It wasn't your HDD. I was using a 2TB seagate barracuda and had the same problems. On a basic SATA III SSD everything smoothed out.
Woah this is wholesome I learned something new, Love the diagram explaining how the data is storaged in SSD then readed by the memory then to cpu decompress, love it.
But yeah I didn't know about the Direct Storage part skipping the cpu and getting straight to the memory to GPU
Maybe thats why I have terribles 1% low fps on my old SSD, I have a gtx 1060 paired with ryzen 5 1600, even if I push 60fps on this tweaked system, I have terribles 1% fps low. on modern games that are not even triple AAA
Cheers, thanks for the video♥
1st report with benchmarks about games and DirectStorage I encountered in the media. Very interesting, well done!
Hello, learning is very easy on your videos due to the very clear communication you present. I enjoyed this one and it will affect my next SSD purchase decision, thanks.
As always an amazing, complete and in depth analisys, I've discovered your channel recently and I wish I did sooner.
Would have appreciated a run win a lower gen GPU with the HDD and the SN850X to see the difference there, but huge compliments nevertheless.
Love your videos - very informative, good comparison, practical info, useful conclusions...Awesome!
Thank you!
Very intriguing review and comparison. I was not expecting the FPS difference. It will be interesting to see if more game titles adopt direct storage. Thank you for the analysis video!
It really makes sense for open-world games where assets are getting loaded in all the time. A game like Oblivion would run like a dream with this tech!
Old games with smaller worlds, barely any geometry and last gen textures have no benefit. You need to look at newer openworld games.
@@Xfade81 Nowadays the hardware can compensate just fine, but Oblivion had and still has a large game world that's notorious for completely stopping the game to load the next cell of the map, not to mention you first encounter a loading screen before entering any building. I'm just saying, a game like that could've benefitted.
If larger capacity SSDs are faster than smaller capacity SSDs, when does this reach a point of diminishing returns ie. 1 TB vs 4 TB, and how much more FPS would a larger capacity give you in this game?
I imagine it's a similar situation to RAM where if the same overall capacity is split into more individual chips it can divide up workloads better.
The effect is definitely way less noticeable on drives above 1tb
Not sure at what point it stops scaling. Would probably also depend on specific workload to some degree
IIRC it was 1TB , anything more will take more time to read the drive
@@ironeleven This is indeed how it works and with a shift to higher density memory chips every couple generations the capacity where performance lift is most likely to be noticed will rise.
Like if 1TB is the threshold for them to start using 2 memory chips than that's when you'll notice the performance jump but if density improves to the point of only needing 1 memory chip to reach 1TB capacity than you'll need a drive with greater than 1TB to see the jump in performance.
1TB is the magic number. 500GB is way slower, 4TB is minimally faster.
Thanks for covering this. Next time you do DirectStorage benchmarking I'd love it if you could include frametime performance graphs in favour of the traditional AVG FPS + 1% Low chart. Ultimately I think what we're looking for is a reduction of frametime spikes (stutters) when game assets are loading in, and a frametime graph will showcase that perfectly.
Yup, I think that's exactly it. And I think it's because the game just isn't pre-loading game data properly and relying on DS to make up for bad programming and resource management.
My pleasure. And I’ll definitely think about a solution for that. Mostly a practical challenge with graphing which already takes ages.
@@TechTesters Understandable, thanks for your response!
@@TechTesters It would be super cool if you did frame time plots. They're quite useful but they're also quite rare. You could also consider doing metrics like "time spent above 16ms" or other similar things to make them easier to understand.
@@TechTesters As I watch your channel more and more, I am ever more impressed with the graphs you present showing test results. I can appreciate the amount of testing and other work you put in to supply results.
Thank you for the great comparison 👍....❤from INDIA .
So many games have heavy asset streaming these days. Yet no one is actually benchmarking SSD performance in them. I think having a faster gen 4 SSD with dram crash actually improves performance in modern games. I would love to see more testing done in more asset streaming heavy games like Starfield, Jedi Survivor, Immortals of Aveum, Alan Wake 2 ECT. There has to be a reason that I get better performance than benchmarks using the same GPU as mine with an equal or better CPU. I think good dram cache could be a part of it, allowing assets to be located and streamed out faster. This is the only video I've found even looking at SSD performance in modern games.
Thanks for the tests. I'd say that frame time graphs would be able to shed more light on the FPS behaviour. My guess is that most of the time frame rate is the same regardless of the drive. The question is whether the frame rate dips are random or concentrated. If they are concentrated, that won't be much of an issue. Averages won't convey this.
Great job, as usual. Thanks for your storage testing. :)
Wow! Great testing. This needs more attention!
Helpful video, thank you
Pretty glad I picked up the SN850X 2TB (on sale at microcenter) after watching a couple of your other NVME SSD videos. This thing is blazing fast and didn't break my wallet for the 2TB version.
A beautiful host, sharp studio, clear presentation, and interesting topics. Thank you!
Thanks for the hard work here, the P3 plus looks like a great value at 4 Tb for $223 as a second mass storage drive for games with direct storage.
Thank u for this video, people seen me as crazy when I said storage affects fps like 2 years ago
Great testing and results. I appreciate this and interesting.
Way to use the term "margin of error" correctly. I don't think I've ever seen another reviewer do that lol.
High five!
Thanks so much. This video is awesome
Thanks for another good tech review. I hope it follows up with more testing on the matter- AMD SAM on\off, VRAM size, like you mentioned different GPU\CPU "horsepower". Just 2-3 examples would suffice I guess. Also trying blue vs red team. Oh and ofc 5800x3D.
thanks for your hard work
Love your explaining! Thank you very much 🤩
Forza Motorsport on PC would be the next BIG game release using Direct Storage.
Would be nice to see a video on it, when paired with the latest Gen 5 drives.
Direct Storage is a future solution imo which isn’t much relevant for at least another year or two when its more mainstream. I currently have a couple mid range Gen4, 5x mid/high end Gen3 and a number of higher end SATA SSD drives and tbh a couple seconds of occasional loading is nothing to worry about imo. On another note, between ram / cpu / GPU and now storage tweaking ….. a few % improvement on each of these can easily equate to a generational pc upgrade or performance tier increase which is impressive as many will benefit from this. It’s interesting to see what the future holds.
Normally yes. It will take a while for something cutting edge to come along and be any good.
DS however is not a massive overhaul and it alleviates of one of the main bottlenecks: slow storage. Or better said, bypasses some of the emulation layers and cpu intervention.
It has been demo'd to be more than just a few seconds faster in loads, it can almost instantly load up large datasets using DirectFlash, a winning combo, and DirectFlash is what will take years, sadly.
Feel like it'd make a bigger difference at higher FPS numbers where the CPU is more of a bottleneck. Perhaps should have texted at lower settings and 1080p
It’s cuz forspoken is running on direct storage 1.0. Gpu decompression was introduced in direct storage 1.1. CPU is still doing the decompression here
No test for intel 905p or 5600x?
Happy Valentine's Day! 💞
Thank you ☺
Very informative and to the point, thank you.
the forstPoken game uses DirectStorage BUT was developed with a version that did not implement direct decompression via GPU. Or the main feature of DirectStorage.
So happy with my 4TB SN850X that I put all my games on. 😎
Aside from games, what about RAID cards? Which NVMes are best for a card that can hold 4 NVMes?
good question, what about RAID 0 NVME ?
Awesome video as always
Thanks Nada, I'd love to see a test of ReFS performance on various desktop storage as I've been building myself NVME mirrored storage spaces for my data and games in a work/game pc and getting a comparison of where I can see an increase and on what types of storage it makes a difference would be cool!
A video showing Cache size benefits would be an excellent topic. Many gamers play car and plane simulators. A review of controllers they might use would be informative.
People need to understand that, regardless of the API used (even though it can play a significant role, detrimental even in some cases), what is equally important FOR GAMES is the 4K random READ speeds of a drive, because this reduces stuttering when games are streaming assets to RAM and VRAM and combined with with low latency RAM (and of course a fast CPU to make the decompression or at least handle the interrupts for handshakes in the case of DS), you will be getting the best in terms of consistent frame times which is absurdly more important than just pushing more and more frames, frame consistency, is, and will almost always be the KING as long as you can hit the FPS target you need, not like, need, huge distinction which a lot people don't case but should.
Another reason as to why the 4K random READ speeds (and sequential as well but to way less extend for SSDs at least) of any drive is what matters most is this, because that's what a gamer uses a drive filled with games for MOST of the time, because remember, you install the game once, so it's kinda ok to take more 1-30 mins more for a game to install but play perfectly consistently because the driver has faster read speeds than writes.
Edit: Seriously, not even the amount of DRAM used on almost all drives will help much if the assets need to be red again and again from the last layer of the storage's NAND memoery (DRAM>SLC>MLC>TLC>QLC and some don't have the first two, in fact most low and mid range don't) unless the game is coded for a very specific hardware and/or there is an amazing scheduler on the drive and can take which data is used often enough to keep them in the dram but most drives don't have big enough DRAMs anyway, biggest i've seen was 2GB on like on an 980 2TB i think and they scale it with the disk's capacity so it's another reason why DRAM matter even less as you go down in capacity.
Here's another major TIP most people don't know.
If you are using a drive for the system and games AT THE SAME TIME you NEED an NVME drive with DRAM caching because, the NVME protocol, unlike SATA and M.2 SATA, is the only one which is bidirectional.
This can be a huge deal and will allow for less stuttering in games because an NVME drive can read and write at the same time especially with a DRAM, and you bet your lovely a** that the system/OS is gonna use the drive to write something while you are gaming which is why you NEED an NVME in that case especially if you are playing games which are doing constant and/or intensive texture /streaming.
SATA-based drives cannot do this, also, SAS can but they are mostly for servers.
Some system manager/protection type 3rd party products prevents direct storage to work. Those have file filter drivers which interrupt direct data flow.
Considering direct storage is a feature on PS5 as well, it's probably gonna become a gaming standard this generation.
nice job, thanks
It's a great day when you upload.
The statement at the start about faster storage USUALLY being very very small is a big qualifier. Some games storage matters a lot for. Star Citizen absolutely hammers the CPU, RAM and Storage with all the I/O. One of the few cases where the now discontinued and expensive Optane drives actually put in work. And recent total war titles like Total Warhammer 3, loading time differences for the campaign map are very significant.
Also worth adding that DirectStorage is a DX12 feature. Devs making games with Vulkan can implement this stuff on their own, it just won't be called DirectStorage.
Would be interesting to see an Optane drive or even a ramdisk in comparison to the pcie 4 m.2s. And worth pointing out dram and dramless SSDs in the benchmark and explaining the difference, and talking about system page files stored on the SSD and it's relation to RAM. But that last bit strays a bit from DirectStorage topic.
You should test with a lesser GPU and CPU for comparison as not everyone has the level of equipment you are using
I imagine it’s not everyday case but I’d love to see your test also when MOBO is packed to max with RAM and part of it is used for ramdisk for game - and then compare fastest SSD and ramdisk. ;)
Thanks for interesting benchmark!
Yes there is only one PC game with Direct Storage. It's impossible to get any real conclusion right now of how it performs in games and with different setups. An interesting video, thanks.
Thank you for testing.
Me who stores my games on my hard drive: hmmm Interesting
If mine didn't die last year then I'd probably be looking for a Gen4 upgrade some time this year for sure.
Good work!
Great content. Thanks for sharing!
I'm confident SATA SSDs will be a viable option even for high end systems for still few years in the future. I'm still using the Samsung 850 EVO for storing games. the direct storage games can be installed in the primary SSD which is nvme for most people while anything else can be launched from SATA SSD.
potential to be 'game' changing tech, for real though, having open worlds that load in real time will be so amazing
Why you don't check the game at 1080p? More frames could've given a better picture of the frame differences.
Красивая девушка грамотно рассказывает о компьютерных железках. Смотреть и слушать приятно, да ещё и информативно. Спасибо за контент
Do you recommend XPG Gammix S70 blade for gaming compared to these 4 fastest drive you mentioned in the video?
I have separate videos on that SSD. If it's really cheap it makes sense.
I'm surprised there is a notable difference between Gen3 and Gen4! Did anyone do a comparison between DirectStorage on/off, e.g. by using Win11/10 or removing the direct storage dll file? Is the benefit from DirectStorage similar to that of going from Gen3 to Gen4?
@Techtesters Does it make a difference, if the windows partition is on a 3.0 M2 and the game on a 4.0 M2? (does the game with direct storage have to be on the OS drive?)
Great content
Amazing review, but would be amazing to see midrange system tests.
GPU's zijn interessant enzo, maar ik vindt Nada veel interessanter ;)
Cool video👍 keep it up
Thanks 😁
I've recently added a 2 TB M.2 Crucial P3 Gen 3 SSD and I'm happier than I was. Cutting loading times keep my nerves generally happier.
I never thought upgrading SSD would have a noticeable improvement. From a SATA SSD(MX500) to NVME (SN850x) was an amazing improvement. It wasn't the difference in specific performance, but the overall gains across the board that impressed. I would highly recommend trying to find an NVME SSD for anyone who has a compatible mobo, wait for them to go on sale, I snagged my sn850x(w/ heatsink) on sale for $155+ $20 shipping.
How many TBs if you don't mind me asking? The lowest I was able to find a 2TB SN850x was $170 a couple weeks back
Thanks for the test!
But why didn't you test gen5 nvme ssd (of course in a PCIe5-rig)?
Old SATA-ssd are quite outdated.
Hopefully they do some "way more testing" with the gen5's. I have a feeling this video was made a while ago but not finished or uploaded for a while and also maybe waited till Intel and AMD both had gen5 options.
Another great review!
Thanks Nada!
Still not regretting only have Sata drives in my PC, but it does look like the gaming industry is finally going to start moving in the direction of making use of faster storage (on PC, since consoles already doing somewhat nicely with this.) Also if Square Enix are getting performance out of it in a PC port, then you gotta assume some of the slightly better PC developers out there can probably do more... WIll also be interesting to see games start using GPU decompression and how that'll impact performance.
I'll probably look to grabbing one around the sales at the end of the year (unless I spot something reasonably priced before then.) Will definitely want one when Star Citizen eventually implements something like RTX-IO or whatever the Vulkan version of Direct Storage ends up being called (though that's likely to be a while off.)
huh. Interesting that it does affect FPS. I don't think it should happen, but the difference is bigger than what can be scoffed off as margin of error.
Why though? Is it because it's trying to load assets directly from SSD to VRAM, hence making the SSD act like an extension of the VRAM? Very interesting to think about. Maybe a deeper dive to this would be appreciated.
Cool in terms of tech geekness (I am), but I wouldn't spend a second taking DirectStorage into consideration when picking a drive.
Interesting video, thanks for sharing.
Brains and Beauty. Thanks for the review.
That is cool, hopefully more games soon!
Great testing.
one thing to note is they have no generation requirements for this game so i think they use a very low bandwidth direct storage. would be intrestring to see when a game asks for say 2gb/s minimal or w/e.
I don't see that happening, at least not until this kind of technology has spread far enough that developers might change how loading assets is handled altogether. Maybe I'm missing aspects of this but at the moment you either get a loading screen, some sort of scalable transition area (like an elevator ride) or a fixed length corridor/sub-area that is used to hide the loading screen. Especially in the last case, you kind of have to determine a threshold of how fast or slow your players will load the data for any given area, and then design the transition appropriately.
That being said, it would be kinda cool to see a game that has an option to replace these lengthy areas with much shorter ones for players with the necessary hardware.
Hey great video! Subbed!
I nearly doubled my fps in a number of games by switching from a Sabrent rocket q to an intel Optane drive. Seriously double fps! I saw this in new and old games, such as Mech warrior online and Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5 with ray tracing enabled. both struggled to get 45 fps and went to about 70- 90 fps after switching to optane. It blew me away how different it was.
Recently with dead space nvme storage is head and shoulders over older SSD data drives with all the data streaming when I switched.
it still stutters like mad on an NVMe drive
@@tinostarks “mad” not for me on my pc after I switched. Only when loading cavernous areas, and it’s only a hitch not continuous.
My favorite tech reviewer hands down!
Thanks for this video, thank you that you share your knowledge with us!
Is there any possibility to see on your channel the relations of de/encoding of videos, as f.e. in Handbrake or similar software? What depend on speed fps etc? It would be great to see it on your channel! Thanks in advance for your efforts!
I bought mine Agard 1tb gen4. Best price in market.
Interesting video thanks!
This is so valuable! Is there any chance that the stutters in games with shader compilation issues and other problems causing stutter could be slightly reduced with a faster SSD even if there‘s no Direct Storage involved? I‘m really tired of the massive stutters in some games, so I‘ll gladly take any benefit I can get no matter how small…
It can be different reason why you will experience "stutter" or "lag" as it can be that frames aren't rendered fast enough (GPU dependent) or CPU can't keep up with calculation that need to be done before it start to render next scene or object (CPU need also to process background task for anti-cheating and antivirus protection will also add into that chain and more and more games start to use anti-cheat apps as part of its operation).
As far as I understand this tech it is meant to bypass CPU to process compressed material which instead are now going directly to GPUs processing. Shader Compilation is normally being done only once and then kept in storage until you change resolution or anything that will force an update of Shader.
(Read link down here that explains
I don't think DS will be able to change how Shader Compilation work at this stage as it would mean that games would have to be designed (as execution of Shaders then have to be run at GPU instead of CPU) and expect that end user also have this set up infrastructure for it to work with fast enough GPU for processing and enough powerful (fast) NVMe on their system to take advantage of this move.
(Maybe one reason why games that have been ported from console like Forespoken have been using DS at this stage as infrastructure are more set in that environment - for PC gaming you have much larger variation for GPU, CPU and storage then on consoles like XBOX, PS etc).
Here you can read more about what DS are meant to deal with:learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/system/overviews/directstorage/directstorage-overview
It is important to understand that VRAM on GPU isn't the same as system RAM and that means that what stored in VRAM needs to be translated into GPUs API from CPU and that part creates an overhead.
Another amazing video! So the rumors that DS worsens in performance should be forgotten.
Yes, those initial benchmarks were flawed because they included the framerates on the game's loading screens. The slower the drive, the more time spent on the loading screens, where framerates were super high, and the greater the boost to the overall framerates.
Thank you! And what Osprey said :)
looks very promising but I have one problem with the data you presented, the graph at 3:18 doesn't say what any of the bars actually represent.
Glad i didn't make a mistake buying the WD SN870X instead of 2 990 pros I do plan to get a 990 pro but will be using that as my game drive and for OS will be the SN870x due to its fastest loading time and at the same time not worry too much regarding that whole firmware or health degrading issue going on with the 990 pro I heard its going on mostly with the ones installed in their OS drive and not game drive(secondary drive)
There's no differences because game need to read fast, but NVME only capable to write fast. It's useless, even pcie5 NVME also uselessness in term of 4K reading
thats why you should have 2 different test benches a high end and a mid ranch