Microsoft will soon add GPU decompression to Windows PC games. Following the release of DirectStorage earlier this year, GPU decompression appears to be the next step in the ongoing effort to improve game load times on PCs.
According to Microsoft, it is “one of our most highly requested features” by game developers.
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GPU decompression works by offloading the work required to decompress game assets to the graphics card rather than the CPU.
Modern games contain massive amounts of assets such as characters, landscapes, and objects, all of which are compressed to reduce the overall size of the game.
“Typically, decompression work is done on the CPU because compression formats have historically been optimized for CPUs only,” explains Cassie Hoef, a senior program manager at Microsoft.
“We are offering an alternative method in DirectStorage 1.1 by moving the decompression of those assets to the GPU instead — known as GPU decompression.”
Load times in games can be dramatically reduced by shifting this workload to a GPU, even in areas where you’re moving from one world to another.
Microsoft claims that this can be up to three times faster, freeing up CPU resources for other game processes. “With the release of DirectStorage 1.1, game developers will embark on a new journey to make full use of gaming hardware and speed up load times for PC games over the next few years,” says Hoef.
These new enhancements will be available to developers in both Windows 10 and Windows 11. According to Microsoft, “additional optimizations in the IO stack are available to Windows 11 users,” making that the best choice for GPU decompression and DirectStorage in general.
GPU manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD will also need to release DirectStorage 1.1 drivers before Microsoft’s final release later this year.
While DirectStorage promises the same lightning-fast load times as Xbox Series X consoles, we haven’t seen many PC games adopt this technology yet. Forspoken was supposed to be the first big game to support DirectStorage, but the release date was pushed back to January 2023.
