Last week, Microsoft announced that DirectStorage will usher in "a new era of fast loading times and the world of detail in PC games." While this may seem a bit bragging right now, the developers of the upcoming technology showcase game The Land of The Enchanted Lands now claim that a one-second load time is entirely possible.
Speaking about the technology used in the PC version of the game in the GDC 2022 talk, Teppei Ono, director of technology at Luminous Productions, said that if your Windows 11 PC has an NVMe SSD, Enchanted Land will actually load some scenes in a second, with a read speed of more than 5,000MB/s.
Not every scene only takes 1 second to load, and he doesn't actually show us any scenes that load during that time. The Show's Enchanted Land requires 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds, and 2.2 seconds of cutscenes and game examples, thanks to DirectStorage's technology that offloads graphics resources from the CPU to the GPU.
Teppei Ono gave a negative answer to the current question of whether the loading speed is much faster than games that do not support DirectStorage technology, saying that it is not the case for the time being: although the SSD will certainly be much faster than the mechanical hard disk, and the replacement from the SATA interface hard disk to the NVMe solid state will also be greatly improved, but the current DirectStorage technology in The Enchanted Land only eliminates the bottleneck on the I/O, and other bottlenecks exist on the CPU.
At the same time, Teppei Ono also said that DirectStorage does not improve the performance of mechanical hard disks: "Due to hard disk performance limitations, HDDs do not provide the expected results. ”
Ono says "I/O is no longer a bottleneck in load time", and for SSDs, DirectoStorage's data transfer speed is significantly faster, and if they find other CPU bottlenecks in the future and take full advantage of GPU graphics resources to decompress, the speed may be further improved.
Overall, he says, most PC games don't take full advantage of high-speed NVMe SSDs like Place of The Curse, claiming that most games take more than 10 seconds to load. For Place of Spells, Ono says, they're also using other techniques to speed up loading times, such as loading games ahead of time while you're on the title screen.
AMD also previously revealed that Land of Spells will support the FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 upgrade for higher effective resolution or faster frame rates, which the team said took less than a week to integrate into the game.