The arrival of DirectStorage in Windows 11 was one of the key points of the announcement of the then future version of Microsoft’s operating system. It was previously expected to reach Windows 10 at some point, though Microsoft later denied that… and then reconfirmed that it would, albeit partially. In short, a mess of volume and spine that leaves us with yes and no and also a bit of the opposite. But in case you are a Windows 10 user and were left in doubt, the good news is that you can use it.

Last November, DirectStorage 1.1, the new version of the Microsoft API for Windows 11 and 10, was finally launched, which is the de facto starting signal for this much-awaited technology by Windows users. for Xbox Series X users | WITH.

As you probably remember, DirectStorage significantly increases system performance when running games that use this technology by creating a direct channel between the system RAM and the graphics card RAM, thus avoiding the bottleneck that is generated by the traditional procedure where data extracted from storage must also pass through the system processor.

So if Microsoft has already released DirectStorage API 1.1 and users’ operating systems are ready to take advantage of this technology, does that mean they can? The truth is, no, because there are still no games that can use it. The first of them is expected to arrive during the first months of this year 2023, but the dates are still not completely clear in this regard, so we will have to wait at least a little longer to find out when we can start enjoying this technology. in Windows.

And does it make sense to count the days in this wait? The truth is, yes, because we are talking about a truly disruptive technology in terms of performance, as we have already seen in some previous tests, and this is confirmed by the measurements carried out by PCgamesHardware (in German), which has carried out tests with AMD, Intel and NVIDIA graphics cards and also performance without DirectStorage, i.e. with the processor taking over the decompression functions that were delegated to the GPU by this technology. For this purpose, they used an application designed specifically for this, and in the table below you can see more than surprising results:

As surprising as it is that the Intel graphics card is the one that provides the best performance at this point, the table shows the average of five gigabytes per second transfer speed tests. As we can see, the jump in performance from SSDs to NVMe memory has been a huge performance leap, and removing the CPU from the equation allows DirectStorage for games to finally take advantage of it. Well, when the games come, you know what I mean.