Xbox Series X’s storage tech is said to supercharge Windows 10 PCs.
One of the Xbox Series X’s best features might be the 12 teraflops of graphics power, but the speedy SSD storage is the one that’ll matter. And this feature will be available on Windows 10 PCs.
Microsoft is now working on introducing its DirectStorage API to Windows 10 devs. It hopes that they’ll have the right tools to enable games to tap correctly into advancements made in SSDs, like the PCIe and NVMe storage. Here is what you need to know.
What Does Xbox Series X Have in Store for Windows 10 PCs
There is a lot of intriguing information on Microsoft’s blog regarding its plans. In a nutshell, the company’s goal is to boost the in-out (IO) interactions between fast SSDs and software. And it’s not going to be the first time. Microsoft has done something like that with the Xbox Series X’s custom NVMe storage and its Velocity Architecture.
Microsoft detailed that future games are very good at breaking down complex data. So, by cutting down games assets such as textures into little pieces and only loading what’s necessary for the current game scene being rendered, upcoming games use many more IO processes than previous ones.
The current strategy is more efficient, but require many IO processes, which the tech giant said can be an issue for PCs now. Microsoft released a statement saying: “Even with super-fast PC hardware and an NVMe drive, games using the existing APIs will be unable to fully saturate the IO pipeline leaving precious bandwidth on the table.”
DirectStorage, however, plans to fix such an issue by optimizing the flow of data from NVMe storage to the graphics card bringing all the game rendering. Such a method will offer more IO and better decompression of assets pulled from an SSD and into a GPU.
So, if you have a Microsoft 10 PC with SSD and NVMe storage, then you could end up receiving much faster loading times when playing new games.
