Microsoft has released DirectStorage 1.2, an update to its well-known API which, as many of our readers know, is designed to improve the performance of storage drives, although it has become particularly popular for transfer data decompression tasks installed on SSDs from CPU to GPUa change that reduces the load on the processor and makes it possible to significantly reduce the loading time.

With DirectStorage 1.2 we face an update that fix some mistakes present in the previous version, viz improves performance basically even in HDDs, which as our readers are sure to know, are characterized by being slower than SSDs and having much higher latencies than them, ultimately making access times worse.

Hard drives worked in I/O (input and output) mode precisely because they have much longer seek times than SSDs. Well, as Microsoft explained, DirectStorage opens files in unbuffered mode because this makes it possible to avoid unnecessary copies and get the data to the GPU as quickly as possible. However, they took note of suggestions from some developers who said they would like to be able to use the same code on both high-speed SSDs and hard drives.

With the release of DirectStorage 1.2, Microsoft finally gave developers an option use I/O buffer mode with hard drives. In addition to this important change, a new API has been incorporated “GetCompressionSupport”, which introduces the possibility of indicating the used decompression path (via GPU or CPU).

Another important change that affects performance is instant copy, after decompression, to the GPU rendering queue to speed up the work. Finally, it is clear that using the GPU to perform decompression tasks has become a mainstay not only because it can be completed in less time, but also becauseYou can move it forward more efficiently.

It will be interesting to see how this new DirectStorage 1.2 feature improves the performance of slower hard drives and what impact it will ultimately have in real use scenarios. If you want to see more details about this new API, I invite you to take a look at the official Microsoft website, where you can also find information about the bugs that have been fixed by this update.