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

Last Monday, Microsoft announced that DirectStorage You will enter “a new era of fast loading times and the detailed worlds of computer games.” And while that now looks a bit grandiose, he’s the developer of the upcoming tech show game foresbook It now claims that 1-second load times are legitimately within reach.

speak At GDC 2022 . Show About the technology included in the PC version of the game, Luminous Productions Technical Director 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 second loading time isn’t the case for every scene, and it didn’t actually show us any loading scenes in that amount of time – instead we’ve seen examples of scenes and gameplay where foresbook It took 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds and 2.2 seconds to get us there, thanks The way DirectStorage offloads the stream of graphics assets from the CPU to the GPU.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

You might be wondering if this is much faster than playing games without DirectStorageAnd the Ono admits that the answer is actually no, not yet: While you’ll certainly see a massive increase in speed from an SSD over the hard drive’s magnetic spinning platters, and from an NVMe SSD over a slower SATA drive, DirectStorage is implemented in foresbook It removes only one of the big I/O bottlenecks – others are on the CPU.

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

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

But, says Ono, “I/O is no longer a bottleneck for load times” – DirectStorage data transfer speeds are clearly faster for SSDs, and they could improve on it in the future if they detect other bottlenecks in the CPU and take full advantage of decoding GPU asset compression.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

In general, he says, most PC games don’t take advantage of a fast NVMe SSD like they do foresbook, claiming that load times for most games are over 10 seconds. In my experience, the fastest loading times I’ve seen were on Final Fantasy VII Intergrade Remake on PS5, which can only take 10 seconds from the time you leave the PS5 home screen to the time you can move your character, four to five times faster than the PS4. It is not clear whether foresbook It depends from application startup to playable play or not.

With foresbookOno says they use other techniques to speed up loading times as well, like loading the game in advance while you’re at the title screen.

As AMD was revealed today who – which foresbook Will support FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 Scaling up the temporal level for higher effective resolutions or faster frames, which the team says took less than a week to integrate into the game.