DirectStorage Signals The End Of SATA SSDs



The release of Forspoken marks the first PC game to feature DirectStorage, a new technology that could change things for PC …

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This Post Has 44 Comments

  1. CE User

    It is all about capacity now. Most nvme ssds are capped at 2TB and file sizes are getting larger not smaller.

  2. Those are some of the slowest gen3 drives I've seen. I wonder how more modern ones would stack up against gen 4.

  3. The results of the nvme vs hdd benchmark (instead of ds off vs on) shows DS is relevant in situations where available vram is exceeded. You should have tried that with a low vram gpu instead of that 4090.

  4. Ray Lopez

    @22:04 note the early generation SSD drives are about as fast as the top of the line mechanical HDD at 7200 rpm. This is consistent with what earlier consumers found, that at best solid state drives were roughly 2x of the mechanical hard drive, at best, and often about the same in real world performance. Once again, you've been had if you try and follow the consumer electronics hype, which is geared towards making gullible consumers like you BUY, BUY, BUY. That said, to impress my girl, I got her a state of the art laptop recently. What I've noticed is that often the people who do real work, and that includes programmers, often work on out-of-date hardware, or at least not bleeding edge. Gamers and women and people who are into signaling are the drivers of buying the latest cutting edge stuff.

    Writing this from a 12 year old laptop I got for $100 on eBay, and for my needs, it works fine. Cuz i'm a boss…

  5. Cywlexeem Tacac

    Poor old fellow, working hard to earn his buck from the big guys telling us stories about importance of not using the old HDDs which nobody's using for gaming but him. He has just bought an SATA SSD for gaming and realized how screwed he was.

  6. The Eyles

    You can put your photos and music on the old SATA drives. Save a bit more space on the new drive for the videos and games.

  7. Tony

    Yeah I'm good with my pcie 3.0 970 EVO, I can wait 1 or 2 secs more over a gen 4 drive when loading levels it's not really a difference at all. Hell you can sneeze in that 1-2 sec window and the game will be loaded🤣 Plus Forspoken is 💩 and not worth your time. The game is only good for this, a direct storage benchmark and nothing more. What's sad is that, there are no other games that use DS this year, I would have thought every game company would be all over it since it was first announced from MS. What they can do if it's possible is to maybe patch older games with DS tech. that would at least give DS more of a boost.

  8. Fire Falcon

    So basically
    Streamers/Workstations need Gen 4
    Anyone in the Market for used or cheap SSDs look for Gen 3 although Sata will do just fine.
    Hard Drives arent dead as long as there is no texture pop-in

  9. kelownatechkid

    SATA is very useful… until manufacturers give us way more PCIe lanes (for installing HBAs, NVMe, etc instead) we need SATA on the motherboard.

  10. GoblinPhreak

    True Story, the game The Cycle: Frontier seems to use direct storage. It has instant load times. We have four of us in the friend group who played. My Gen3 NVME, my buddy on Gen3 NVME, my other buddy on SATA NVME, and then my other buddy with an OG platter drive (all his games are on the platter drive instead of NVME for some reason). Loading into the game, me and my buddy on gen3 NVME load in instantly. Like no wait time. Then a few seconds later our buddy with sata NVME loads in. and then after like 10-15 seconds my buddy on the platter drive loads in. which shows similar results to your video. I wonder if that game had used direct storage before forspoken even came out. oddly the game launched last year so the whole windows support thing makes me question it. so i dont know. but the timings made sense.

    on the note of "you should never buy a 4090 for 1080p" why? the whole point of buying a higher end card is to get more fps. some people would rather have insane high fps for smoother gameplay. back in the day I grew up on hand-me-down computers and had to play return to castle wolfenstein multiplayer at 30fps and when the free to play multiplayer enhanced version came out, wolfenstein enemy territory, I got 5-15fps. it was freaking horrible. i pretty much always struggled to win my gun fights. i ended up learning the game enough to keep up with people who had better computers. then my dad finally decided it was time for my brother and I to get our own custom computers. so we picked out parts and the place we ordered from (monarch systems, og and no longer exists) sent us our completed build. athlon x2 4400 2.2ghz true dual core with 4gb ram and evga 7800gtx gpu. I now got 200+fps in enemy territory and i became unstoppable. I was always top of the leaderboard with highest kills and highest kill to death ratio. i was literally a god. it was epic. game knowledge + fast pc = win. not to mention I had comcast back then with their fastest offering (5/.768 if I remember correctly) with this epic d-link gaming router…. even in modern gaming, cs:go for example, 150fps is 6ms render time. 300fps is 3ms render time. meaning higher fps gives you the fastest most up to date image possible meaning you can react faster. don't get me wrong, i understand that peoples physical reaction time is on average between 200-250ms…. but the point is when you see the enemy. if I see the enemy 5ms faster than you, and we both have 200ms reaction time, I will kill him at 200ms while you kill him at 205ms….. i win. it doesn't seem to be true but it is. SADLY, modern fps gaming is riddled with cheaters who pretend like they are legit. and you can tell because they break game rules they never learned in the first place. in the case of cs:go, you cannot "run and gun" with assault rifles and snipers. you have to stand still to get kills. movement causes your bullets to go way off center of your crosshair target. so its impossible for example to be running with an awp sniper and still hit someone. it just wont happen. the game is programmed to make you miss. and yet cheaters will run and gun all day long and pretend like its totally normal. and then when you call them out they go super toxic and start trash talking to defend their cheats. legit players who are actually skilled at a game wont talk shit. at least not to your face. they might say to their friends privately "these kids suck" but they wont spam chat about how trash others are…. that's cheater mentality.

  11. kelownatechkid

    Thank you for testing with optane. Pity you didn't have one of the 380GB or larger (960, 1.5TB etc) models

  12. Justice Gaming

    Really good tests, thanks for puttiing in the work, it's itneresting to see the differences between SATA, Gen3 and Gen4 SSDs, as well as Host Bust SSDs and ones with DRAM cache, and QLC vs TLC, shows that there are technical performance differences.

  13. MarcasswellbMD

    I have a Gen 4 980 500Gig M.2 for my OS, and then I keep steam games on my Gen 3 1T 970 M.2, so far so good.. So far I haven't needed this so I guess we will see..

  14. Andi K

    I do have a hope that Microsoft implement this into Bethseda (their own company) games becuase if load times are a thing as you posit, these games need load level increases. Great vid Gordon thank you

  15. Patr!ck

    Forspoken requires at minimum 150GB of storage capacity, your Optane 800P drive has only 118GB of storage capacity and is also a PCIe Gen3 x2 drive (not x4). Two reasons that might explain why you couldn't run the game on that drive.

  16. Keivz

    3 of my drives are represented here—860 Evo, sk Hynix p41, WD blue. Nice!

  17. Vail PCs

    So…. what IS Direct Storage? You can't tell me if I want it or not of you don't tell me what it is (like RIGHT AT THE START OF THE VIDEO). Who scripts / edits this?!?!

  18. pf100

    Your next video should be an analysis of the Texas power grid.

  19. LightningJR

    Would be nice if they could have direct storage on for loading an off while playing for the fps. Maybe it's just not possible idk.

  20. Fox McCloud

    Should have tested on a P5800X to see just where things could be in another 10-15 years.

    It's an interesting benchmark, for sure, but the more interesting impact will be when you start talking about asset streaming with DirectStorage; how much of an FPS impact will that eventually lead to.

    Shorter load times are definitely great, but as presented, even the difference with DirectStorage is only on the order of a few seconds here and there.

  21. LightningJR

    I think maybe the avocado mark assets are able to load in the hdd's cache making it basically an ssd. Forspoken's assets I'm guessing are too large and the hdd has to read from rge platters.

  22. Braffy

    There are logs for the benchmark in forspoken. It's stored a few folders into the appdata folder in the user folder.

  23. Josha Beukema

    22:00 2GB/s bandwidth for a HDD? A mechanical spinning HDD? On sata, which is limited to 0.6GB/s? As fast as a sata ssd? Should be more like 150MB/s or something. I don't think this test can be trusted. And no DirectDrive on vs off, we already know ssd beats hdd by a fair margin. Sata ssd at 8TB is still viable as it's much cheaper compared to nvme. I appreciate the effort though.

  24. TheTerrorgasm

    I got 18.5GB/s with 980 Pro 6950XT 5600X 32GB DDR4 3600Mhz

  25. Rob R

    Does it though? Don't forget we still have spinning rust around & not going anywhere anytime soon. Which is what SATA SSDs was supposed to be the death kneel for.

  26. Lorenzo Pasini

    I've just tried the demo of Forspoken and I can't see the benchmark there. Did some fiddling from a 980 Pro 2Tb and shuffled it to my other Sabrent RocketQ 1tb (QLC, but not a slow drive in reads by any means as it's 3400mb/s) and on a B550 board.. I can't tell the difference of loading from one to another unless I grab a stopwatch and see that the game maybe loads a tiny little less faster. I haven't tried yet from my other Crucial MX500.

    To be honest Sata SSDs doesn't seem so garbage to load even DS games off from them.

  27. mau557

    This whole test was stupid AF.

  28. raul

    total war warhammer 3 is literally unplayable on hdd

  29. Eldibs

    Right now, this is just load times. Once you're in the game the performance is the same. Going from 6 seconds to 2 seconds is not a big deal on load times. If you can't wait 4 extra seconds, you are spoiled. Now, when the games start utilizing it for anything other than shortening loading screens, it might be worth it. But there's still a place for SATA drives regardless, because the release of a single DirectStorage-enabled game doesn't automatically make every other game disappear.

  30. Zodwraith

    This just shows why I put only the demanding games or games with frequent load screens on NVME since I only have 2tb, and the tons of games that are less demanding I put on an 8tb raid 0 array with hybrid HDDs. The games can be easily redownloaded so I don't care about redundancy when raid 0 gives a huge performance boost. It's a small price to pay for acceptable performance with HDD capacity. It's easy to point out the heavy games that scream for bandwidth but there's still a ton of games that simply don't need it.

    If a game takes 5 seconds to load off the raid array I can live with that. It's the games that take 10 seconds+ that I start making space on an NVME drive.

    It's especially nice to have the glut of your stuff like movies and music on an HDD as they take up a ton of space but require meager throughput. Having that stuff (as long as it doesn't require backup) on any high performance high $ per GB drive is just pointless to me.

    A multi pronged approach for me is vastly superior to saying "just get an NVME". HDDs are still valuable in today's PCs cause not everything needs to be insanely fast, and that includes a lot of games. Capacity per dollar needs to get better before NVMEs or SSDs outnumber my huge spinny boys, but SSDs are getting close to where I might build an SSD raid array.

  31. Gunga Din

    One thing to note. If you are using Malwarebytes anitvirus, it is a know issue that your nvme drive will show up as an error and therefore not compatible with DirectStorage. I read on malwarebytes forums that they are aware of this issue and plan on a fix to make possible to support BypassIO. The reason I brought this up, because I just checked my DirectStorage status and ran into this issue. Other opiton is to uninstall malwarebytes. My exact error code : bypassIo not supported due to driver. MBAMFardlt. Cheers

  32. Brett Combs

    talking about loading game from a hard drive… Worse than that is when a steam game updates a game that's on a hard drive… What takes about 15 minutes might take my buddy several hours on the same exact game because he uses a HDD.

  33. Req

    I hope that this will force a dropping of price on SATA SSDs to encourage people to get them, as atm I think they are too closely priced to make the slower drives as compelling. However if the price difference was more significant I could personally see myself choosing to buy SATA SSDs over faster NVMEs for mass storage: the difference of 2 secs to 4 secs isn't that bothersome to me.

  34. codelinx

    This is a crazy hardware setup that 98% of gamers don't even come close to having let alone have something equivalent to in specs

  35. codelinx

    Don't but forspoken. Waste if money. But great run through of the tech. This game is disgustingly unoptimized and waste your computer hardware capabilities.

  36. Safetytrousers

    HDD's being much slower than SSD's for games is hardly a revelation.

  37. Mercenary Tau

    HDDs still serve a purpose in gaming, I've got my entire steam library on a 16TB. I rarely play more than one game at a time, so I just move them to my NVMe for that playthrough and move it back when I'm done

  38. Lizzy Frizzy

    >ssds have been on the market for years
    >this guy goes nuts with a buzzword claiming new tech
    >doesnt even test new ssds
    We used ramdrives back in the day, "direct storage" means nothing.

  39. John Knight III

    I wish nvme drives would start focusing on latency instead of throughput.

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