The PC version of Forspoken is giving a lot to talk about, among its high minimum requirements to be able to play, asking for a GTX 1060 GB to play at all; and its 150 GB weight that quickly fills an SSD. For a few days now, there have been headlines claiming that DirectStorage causes a performance drop with an RTX 4090 on Forspoken, citing a video from the German YouTube channel PC Games Hardware as proof. Microsoft Direct Storage is designed to vastly improve loading times for PC games, but it is not supposed to affect the frame rate.
The reality is that the DirectStorage implementation in Forspoken does not affect frame rate performance at all. Everything would be reduced to a case of poorly done tests, possibly not replicated to verify their veracity.
DirectStorage does not affect performance badly, it's all due to a bad test
Tom Warren from The Verge tested Forspoken on a rig with an RTX 4090 and an i9-13900KS, with one SATA SSD and one PCIe 4.0 SSD. Although the PC Games Hardware channel found that frame rates dropped by 10% when using a PCIe 4.0 SSD with DirectStorage, Warren was unable to replicate this drop in performance. The performance was identical. But the charging times were very different between the two units.
It is speculated that PC Games Hardware used CapFrameX to measure performance, a capture and analysis tool based on Intel's PresentMon. While it is a widely used application for PC benchmarks, Forspoken's benchmark loading sequences cause black screens at high frame rates which can affect the overall average frame rate. Since load times are longer on a SATA SSD, these black screens stay longer on the screen, which impacts the final average frame rate numbers. PC Games Hardware had to put out a notice in the comments section of the video about the data disparity.
Forspoken is one of the first games to ship on PCs with Microsoft’s DirectStorage enabled, so we were given a guinea pig to test out what DirectStorage can be expected of. While Forspoken uses DirectStorage 1.1, which includes GPU decompression, it doesn’t appear to be making use of it yet. If you add “-noDirectStorage” to Forspoken’s startup options, you can disable it, and without it, some loading points take almost twice as long.
Source: The Verge
