Due to bandwidth constraints, SSDs with different PCIe interfaces tend to perform considerably differently in typical tasks under heavy workloads. However, the difference between PCIe Gen3 and PCIe Gen5 drives may not be as significant when using DirectStorage, according to an analysis performed by the YouTube channel Compussemble.
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Recall that Microsoft DirectStorage 1.1 does not require a central processor to process data unpacking, nor is it supported by the game at all. GPUs optimized for parallel operations can complete tasks almost twice as fast.
DirectStorage's interface offers two main advantages to games: faster loading and reduced CPU usage when processing NVMe requests, which allows for faster and more efficient transfer of assets from storage to the graphics subsystem.
DirectStorage is capable of significantly shortening data decompression, even for SATA SSDs, and raises the question whether the capabilities of SSDs with different interfaces will be so different in games with DirectStorage.
In all cases, downloads from Forspoken were significantly reduced. Even if we combine the load times from seven different scenes in the built-in test, the difference between an advanced PCIe Gen5 x4 Phison E26-based SSD (the controller that many high-speed SSDs will use this year) and an Adata XPG SX8200 Pro PCIe Gen3 x4 drive is only three seconds.
The PCIe Gen3 drive was 32% slower than the PCIe Gen5 SSD in theory, but in practice, this means that the difference was almost non-existent in all summed scenes. Despite the fact that the PCIe 5.0 x4 interface has a four-fold increase in throughput, DirectStorage compression actually blurs the line between different SSDs in games.
If there is only one game that supports Microsoft DirectStorage, getting a PCIe 5.0 drive is by no means unreasonable. The good news is that once DirectStorage becomes more mainstream, current SSDs will likely perform on par with next-gen drives in gaming.
