With the speeds that high-end PC components have reached, the quality of games designed to use them (ie, not those designed with console limitations in mind) can be nothing short of spectacular. More realistic and complex textures, more realistic lighting, refresh rates and resolutions that were unthinkable a few years ago… the qualitative leap is undeniableand the experience these games provide is, to use the parlance of the sector, triple A.

A very clear example of this can be found in Unreal Engine 5, the game development engine and environment from Epic Games that already left us speechless with Matrix Awakens. points to titles in which we rediscover the feeling of “entering” the game. At a high price, yes, because Unreal Engine 5 is particularly demanding in terms of resources, as we could already see after the release of the Megacity Sample Project with Lumen, Nanite and Metahumans from Epic Games. If Microsoft Flight Simulator seemed too demanding (and it is), Unreal Engine 5 could push the bar even higher.

As a general rule, we can say that the performance of a system is determined by its components, which seems obvious ad nauseam, but there is a second factor, also very important, which is the way they interact with each other, as well as the processes that govern these interactions. And it’s that there’s little point in having the best components if it turns out later that the way they work together isn’t optimized or could be even better.

A perfect example of the possibility of process improvement is the one designed by Microsoft with DirectStoragea technology that removes the bottleneck caused by the CPU in the processes of loading textures from the NVMe SSD to the GPU, whose arrival on PC was announced at the presentation of Windows 11 and which, according to some tests, can reduce the loading time by up to an incredible 70%.

Last March, Microsoft released the DirectStorage API to developers, kicking off its implementation into new development. And today we know it from NeoWin DirectStorage support will be integrated directly into Unreal Engine 5. There’s still no set date (at least publicly), but we know it’s already in the works, which is great news for the PC gaming world.

have already occurred some announcements about future titles that will be developed with Unreal Engine 5as well as the part of the Tomb Raider saga that Crystal Dynamics is working on, so this step was very important to encourage more developers to use DirectStorage and for gamers to get a lot more out of the components of their systems.