\n
Last Monday, Microsoft declared that DirectStorage would usher in \u201ca new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games.\u201d<\/a> And while that now seems a little too grandiose, the developer of upcoming tech showcase game Forspoken <\/em>now claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach. <\/p>\n
Speaking at a GDC 2022 presentation<\/a> about the tech embedded in the PC version of the game, Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono says that the Square Enix title will actually load some scenes in one second flat, provided your Windows 11 PC has a NVMe  SSD capable of over 5,000MB\/sec reads. <\/p>\n
That one-second load time is not the case for every scene, and he didn\u2019t actually show us any scenes load in that amount of time \u2014 instead, we saw cutscene and gameplay examples where Forspoken<\/em> took 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds, and 2.2 seconds to get us there, thanks to the way DirectStorage offloads the streaming of graphical assets from the CPU to the GPU<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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    Please forgive the poor quality of these screenshots from the GDC stream.<\/em><\/figcaption>Screenshot by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n    <\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
You might be wondering if that\u2019s substantially faster than games run without<\/em> DirectStorage, <\/em>and Ono admits the answer is actually no, not yet: while you\u2019ll definitely see a huge speed boost from an SSD over the magnetic spinning platters of a hard drive, and from an NVMe SSD over a slower SATA-based drive, the current implementation of DirectStorage in Forspoken<\/em> is only removing one of the big I\/O bottlenecks \u2014 others exist on the CPU.<\/p>\n
And if you\u2019ve been hoping that DirectStorage will bring enhanced performance with regular spinning hard drives, the answer is not yet: \u201cHDDs are not delivering the anticipated result due to hardware performance limitations,\u201d says Ono.<\/p>\n\n  <\/p>\n    <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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    Times are roughly the same for HDD with and without DirectStorage.<\/em><\/figcaption>Screenshot by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n    <\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n\n  <\/p>\n    <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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    Impressive load times on both SATA and M.2, just not significantly different.<\/em><\/figcaption>Screenshot by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n    <\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
But, says Ono, \u201cI\/O is no longer a bottleneck for loading times\u201d \u2014 the data transfer speeds of DirectStorage are clearly faster for SSDs, and they could improve it in future if they figure out other CPU bottlenecks and take full advantage of GPU asset decompression.<\/p>\n\n  <\/p>\n    <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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    Look at that huge jump in I\/O; shame we\u2019re not seeing much in the game yet.<\/em><\/figcaption>Screenshot by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n    <\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\nGenerally, he says, most PC games don\u2019t take anywhere near as much advantage of speedy NVMe SSD as Forspoken<\/em>, claiming that most games have loading times of over 10 seconds. In my experience, the fastest load times I\u2019ve seen were on Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade<\/em> on a PS5<\/a>, which can take just 10 seconds from the time you leave the PS5\u2019s home screen to the time you can move your character, four to five times faster than on PS4. It\u2019s not clear if Forspoken<\/em> is counting from app launch to playable gameplay or not.<\/p>\n
\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p id=\"BeKOKJ\">With <em>Forspoken<\/em>, Ono says they\u2019re using other techniques to speed up load times as well, such as loading the game in advance while you\u2019re on the title screen.<\/p>\n<p id=\"rOfxVd\">AMD also revealed today <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/3\/23\/22993152\/amd-fsr-2-0-xbox-nvidia-gpus\">that <em>Forspoken<\/em> will support FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0<\/a> temporal upscaling for higher effective resolutions or faster framerates, which the team says took less than a week to integrate into the game. <\/p>\n<aside id=\"Sa1KrD\">\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<p><code><br \/><\/br><\/code><\/p>\n<p>Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/3\/23\/22993860\/forspoken-pc-microsoft-directstorage-nvme-ssd-gdc\">https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/3\/23\/22993860\/forspoken-pc-microsoft-directstorage-nvme-ssd-gdc<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Last Monday, Microsoft declared that DirectStorage would usher in \u201ca new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games.\u201d And while that now seems a little too grandiose, the developer of upcoming tech showcase game Forspoken now claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach. Speaking at a GDC 2022 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2194,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-2193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","category-technology","tag-gaming"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Forspoken dev says one-second game loads are now a tentative reality on PC - Science and Nerds<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/03\/24\/forspoken-dev-says-one-second-game-loads-are-now-a-tentative-reality-on-pc\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Forspoken dev says one-second game loads are now a tentative reality on PC - Science and Nerds\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Source: Last Monday, Microsoft declared that DirectStorage would usher in \u201ca new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games.\u201d And while that now seems a little too grandiose, the developer of upcoming tech showcase game Forspoken now claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach. 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