The Redmond giant has confirmed that Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 will arrive on PC later this year. We don’t have a specific date, but from what we know, it probably won’t be available until next month Decemberjust in time for the debut release of Forsaken, the first game to use such technology on PC in January 2023.

Until now we thought SCORN would be the first game that it would come to PC with Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 support, but unfortunately it doesn’t. Those responsible for its development, Ebb Software, confirmed just a few days ago that in the end they will not use this technology in the PC version, although strangely it will be available in the Xbox Series S and Series X version of the said game.

If you’re wondering why the arrival of Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 on PC is so important, don’t worry, we won’t leave you in doubt. This is important because this technology completely frees the CPU from the task of decompressing the resources that the game uses when it has to load, transferring said work to the GPU. It is inherently in accomplishing this task much more efficiently and quicklyand thus achieves a significant performance improvement that significantly reduces load times.

In a technical demo recently done by Microsoft itself, you can see that the load time without Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 was 2.36 secondsand the maximum processor usage speed reached 100%. With this technology, charging time was barely there 0.8 seconds, and the CPU load experienced a maximum peak 15.08%. The difference is noticeable not only in the loading time, but also in the weight that the processor has to carry.

I remind you that Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 will reach both Windows 10 and Windows 11, although according to the Redmond giant, the version for this last operating system has additional optimizations which are not available in the Windows 10 version, so it should offer better performance.

As for the GPU we will need to use this technology, I can confirm that in general any DirectX 12 compatible graphics card that supports Shader Model 6.0 will work without problems with Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1. This means that a modest GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon RX 470 would already be compatible with the mentioned technology, since both support Shader Model 6.4.