NVIDIA Brings the Benefits of DirectStorage 1.1 to Vulkan Under its RTX-IO Brand

NVIDIA dusted off its RTX-IO technology moniker which we thought it retired in the wake of the now-standardized DirectStorage API, in an attempt to bring its benefits to games powered by the Vulkan API. Team Green was the first to introduce such a technology to the PC platform, something functionally-similar existed with game consoles, where it plays a key role in speeding up game loading times. DirectStorage enables a means for the GPU to directly communicate with a storage device, with no round-trips to the CPU cores or main memory. This enables a quicker way for a game to transfer its assets to the video memory. NVIDIA introduces this as part of its latest GeForce 526.98 WHQL drivers. The same drivers also introduce official DirectStorage 1.1 support.

With DirectStorage 1.1, Microsoft went a step ahead and introduced GPU-accelerated game asset decompression. Game assets (such as textures) are stored on your disk in compressed form, and are decompressed as needed when your game loads. This involves the CPU cores, and tends to be slower when compared to getting the same job done by a GPU when not rendering 3D graphics. NVIDIA even developed a file-compression format optimized for highly-parallelized decompression hardware such as GPUs. The standardization by Microsoft extends this feature to other brands of GPUs (such as AMD and Intel, which are confirmed to be implementing it); but games powered by the Vulkan API were left out in the lurch. NVIDIA developed a Vulkan version of the original RTX-IO tech (which would go on to develop into DirectStorage), so now game developers with engines primarily designed for Vulkan (such as idTech), can speed up game load times.