A few days ago NVIDIA introduced not only the Ampere architecture graphics cards, but a number of innovative technologies. The company continues to develop solutions to maximize the performance of its components. One of the new technologies introduced was NVIDIA RTX IO, which allows instant loading of new textures. The basis of this technology is the PCI Express 4.0 interface, which has been adopted in the NVIDIA RTX 3000.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
The current big problem in terms of loading textures lies in the capacity of the graphics VRAM memory. The higher the quality of the textures, the more memory a graphics card needs. NVIDIA's RTX 3000 seem to be built for resolutions of at least 1440p, notably neglecting 1080p resolutions. The RTX 3070 (and above) are already clearly focused on 4K resolutions.
Operating with 4K resolutions implies having to load quite large textures into the VRAM. The larger the texture size, the faster the graphics card memory fills up. This problem is especially present in open world games, such as World of Warcraft or more recently Flight Simulator 2020. Both games have real-time textures and can saturate the VRAM of the graphics.
For this NVIDIA has collaborated with Microsoft to simplify the task and reduce the burden of storing textures on the storage unit. This will be done using the DirectStorage API only available on Windows, Microsoft's operating system.
What is DirectStorage
The low-level DirectStorage API allows you to use the full potential of the M.2 Gen4 drives. It simply creates a direct communication channel between the M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD and the graphics card. It should be noted that this technology will only be compatible with these hard drives, neither SATA nor PCIe 3.0.
DirectStorage allows you to preload the textures in the storage unit and then send them to the VRAM when necessary. Through the PCIe 4.0 interface, this charge is fast, very fast and therefore no performance is lost. This eliminates problems such as the VRAM filling up or seeing low definition textures (pop-in) that improve as we approach them.
One of the problems to date is that the APIs had limited I / O request support. This prevented the use of a technology that will allow the graphics to operate with greater efficiency and performance. By using PCIe 4.0, which offers high bandwidth and parallelization of NVMe drives, we can get fast and efficient loading of textures. This functionality will be available in game exclusively on Windows 11, so it will not be available for Windows 10.
What is NVIDIA RTX IO
They are a set of technologies created by NVIDIA that allow fast GPU-based loading and decompression of game files. This achieves an I / O performance improvement of up to 100 times compared to conventional storage APIs.
Using the DirectStorage API in Windows 10, the processor work is downloaded to an NVIDIA RTTX graphics. This allows to improve the amount of frames and allows the almost instantaneous loading of games. Additionally, this technology allows creating larger, more open and more detailed worlds, as in the case of Flight Simulator 2020.
Thus annoying elements in games such as pop-in and flickering are reduced. The speed of transferring textures is high, although we move around the world at an ever faster speed. All textures load and run efficiently. This is complemented by lossless compression that allows for reduced download and installation sizes of games. This also allows users to store more games on the SSDs, while improving performance.
How NVIDIA RTX IO Works
This new technology works under the DirectStorage API. Microsoft's solution is a storage architecture designed specifically for next-generation NVMe SSD gaming equipment. It was developed with the complex workloads demanded by modern games in mind.
RTX IO and DirectStorage in parallelized combination reduce I / O overhead dramatically. Along with this, you get a maximization of performance and / or bandwidth from NVMe SSDs up to the GPU that supports RTX IO.
New NVIDIA technology offers lossless GPU-based decompression. All textures remain compressed when read by DirectStorage who delivers them to the GPU. Once the GPU takes control of them, it goes on to decompress them. The need to send load to the processor, which performs this task more slowly, is eliminated. To give us an idea, I / O performance is improved by a factor of 2.
GeForce RTX has the ability to decompress beyond even NVMe Gen4 SSDs. The load is removed from the processor cores to maximize overall system performance.
NVIDIA RTX IO Requirements
To make use of this new technology, the following components will be needed:
- Processor and motherboard with support for PCI Express 4.0
- M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD (PCI Express 4.0)
- NVIDIA RTX 3000
- Windows 10
Conclusion
The new NVIDIA RTX IO technology has been developed in collaboration with Microsoft to support the open world games. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 seems to be a game designed to fully exploit this technology. The game is an open world that loads the textures as we progress, generating a great load to the graphics. Implementing a large amount of VRAM is not possible, since it makes the product very expensive, so an efficient solution has been sought.
Through the M.2 NVMe Gen4 units we will obtain the ability to preload the textures. Then the graphics card will demand the textures as they are needed and they will be delivered quickly. This allows the VRAM of the RTX 3000 to be more liberated and problems such as pop-in and flickering are avoided.
[irp]
Being a joint work with MS, is there an equivalent of this technology for AMD? I ask to know if the Series could eventually carry something similar.
To our knowledge there is no AMD alternative to this technology
If someone reads this article, say that the rtx io will work also on the rtx 2000.