What is Microsoft DirectStorage and how does it improve PC gaming?

What’s the big deal about developers including DirectStorage in their PC games?

1. They can use it to improve disk access and speed up loading times in gameplay and between scenes.
2. It helps make games look more realistic and more challenging. They can now design higher-resolution textures and more detailed 3D objects without overcharging the CPU, which no longer has to perform any graphics decompression. Thanks to DirectStorage, that chore is now taken over by the GPU, which does the job calmly, coolly and quickly.

So, as a game player, how do you take advantage of DirectStorage? First, make sure that your system is fit for the job. That means, if necessary, upgrading to either a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD or a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

For those who take their game time very seriously, the Kingston FURY^™ Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is just the ticket. It provides cutting-edge performance in high capacities for gaming enthusiasts seeking extreme performance. By leveraging the latest Gen 4x4 NVMe controller and 3D TLC NAND, it supplies blazing speeds of up to 7,300/7,000MB/s read/write and up to 1,000,000 IOPS (requests for data [I/O] per second*) for amazing consistency and an exceptional gaming experience. It's available in capacities from 500GB–4TB. Plenty of room to store an extensive library of games and media.

(*In their devious creative minds, game developers love to insert many, many, many small pieces of data with information they want translated to the monitor/screen. Requests for such data are referred to as IO or IOPS. The Kingston FURY^™ Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD handles up to a million such requests per second. To which we say: bring it on, developers!)