Benchmarks show DirectStorage negatively impacts performance in Forspoken

Forspoken might not be the best game of the year, but the fact that it's the first PC game to use DirectStorage makes it worth investigating. PC enthusiasts have been testing the game to see how the storage technology affects the gameplay experience and discovered something unexpected. Indeed, loading times were reduced dramatically, but it can also harm performance when using an RTX 4090. 

The team over at PCGH has tested Forspoken running on different types of storage devices. To our surprise, the game's performance differed considerably depending on if it was running on a SATA SSD, a PCIe 3.0 SSD or a PCIe 4.0 SSD. The system specs include an RTX 4090, an Intel Core i9-12900K and 32GB of memory (most likely DDR5).

Regardless of the storage device, the 1% and 0.2% percentiles FPS were within the margin of error, but the average FPS wasn't. On the SATA SSD, the system registered an average FPS of 83.2, while on the PCIe 3.0 SSD, that value was reduced to 75.3. Things got even worse when running the game from the PCIe 4.0 SSD, as the average dropped to 74.4 FPS.

The exact models of the storage devices used in the test were not shared, so it might be worth testing with other models to see if these results can be re-reproduced. If that's the case, maybe developers will have to rethink how they implement the technology. Moreover, it would also be nice to see if the performance in a PCIe 5.0 SSD is in the same ballpark as in the other two PCIe drives.

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KitGuru says: Sacrificing performance to reduce loading times doesn't seem like a very good deal, especially when we're talking about an over 10% reduction in average FPS. If that's the cost of implementing DirectStorage, we might be better off without it.

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