This is going to kill adoption of the new gaming features. I am really excited for Direct Storage on windows, but what incentive do the developers have to support it if only a small subset of their users have machines new enough to run it. This is exactly the same as the DirectX 10 disaster on Vista. It took a long time for developers to switch from 9 to 10. Most skipped 10 for 11 because it had the same windows support. And direct storage is locked to windows 11. Microsoft, you want to be a gaming powerhouse? Maybe listen to developers and stop listening to your executives that don’t understand. Games ported from Xbox Series X will be unable to run on Windows 10 if they require direct storage support.
Because the games don't take advantage of the higher bandwidth. In fact, they probably don't even take advantage of the SSD, because games are still built so that they work when installed on spinning drives. The advantage of SSDs is the random access time, but if you are streaming continuous data, it's only about triple the speed of an HDD.
A NVME PCIe 4.0 SSD can be up to 15 times faster than a SATA SSD. The difference is much much bigger.
It is noticeable, but that's not the point. A SSD-only engine can avoid some asset duplication and achieve an effective 4x speedup over a HDD equivalent, but that is still slow in the grand scheme of things: you could have a bigger or a more detailed environment, but that's about it. A PCI 4 NVME coupled with the latest compression tech means you can renew all the data in RAM in less than 2 seconds. That's the big deal.
That’s because games aren’t designed to take advantage of NVME drives. Direct storage basically connects the ssd to the gpu for fast asset streaming. You will notice when games made for the Xbox get ported to windows 11. It’s seriously an amazing leap in game technology.
I think it's going to be a little bit more challenging as the consoles are ahead with the storage capabilities as a baseline. Back in 2006 the consoles were (roughly) DX9 levels, so there wasn't really much incentive to push ahead unless your studio was a trailblazer. Now studios making games need to think on which audience they prioritize.
To a certain extent I anticipate it could be "a storm in a teacup", the new consoles have strong CPUs so that would naturally drive people gaming on PC to upgrade anyway. There's no games coming out (that I know of) with an imminent need to utilize direct storage, but I'd guess late 2022/2023 onwards is where it becomes strongly encouraged.
