I was looking into the Benefits of these two technologies.
I think MSFS can take advantage with: faster sim and flight loading, faster loading of textures, less terrain morphing, longer view distances, smoother online multiplayer, better photogrammetry loading, generally less bottle necks, and of course higher FPS. I think this is the breakthrough for data loading. Bring it on 2023!
DirectStorage is a new piece of software that enables games to take advantage of fast NVMe SSDs
GPUDirect Storage is a new technology that creates a straight data path between remote or local storage and GPU memory. It prevents the inconvenience of creating extra copies via the CPU memory’s bounce buffer. Instead, it allows storage to transfer data directly to or from the GPU without straining the CPU.
There is not enough drive activity to make use of direct storage for MSFS. Install HWinfo and run the game to see exactly how much your drive is in use. When the game loads into the main menu, it takes in about 13gb on my system. This is roughly 2 seconds drive read time over a 40 second load time. After this the drive barely gets touched.
On the Mac side we are at the moment seeing rumours of the new MacPro 8,1 and what it may or may not be.
Rumours exist of prototype test machines already out there in the field with multiple processors clustered together with huge numbers of cores (and even greater numbers of GPU cores as well) and massive amounts of high speed shared memory. Now we are hearing of this “Redfern” processor which is a pair of M1 Ultra chips linked together which gives some crazy ability, provided software developers build for it.
Discreet GPUs seem to be on the way out, sadly. With this architecture, Windows seems to be out as well. And any hope of upgrading in steps seems like it won’t be possible. What you buy is what you are stuck with. I know some people are waiting to see what happens and if they are stuck with a machine that can’t be upgraded and won’t run windows, they will move over to PC.
It seems almost certain Intel is gone. Will the PC land also go down that path? Hope it won’t do it totally.
It’s a distinct difference to now where you can easily upgrade the machine you purchased from something quite basic to a 28 core monster with four GPU cores, 128GB video ram and 1536GB ram, completely insane specifications. Some studios do use such machines. Definitely no use for games.
With the machine I have now, I’m hoping I’ll get many years out of it then I can decide what next. At least I could buy the mid range and then upgrade it later.
I have Samsung NVME drives at the moment on a Sonnet M2 card (in a PCI-E X16 slot), those are extremely fast. That’s what my Windows install and FS2020 uses, while MacOS is on the inbuilt Apple SSD which is linked to the T2 security chip.
I take it you mean windows on a Mac, and due to Mac GPUs moving to chiplet architecture.
I would not be so sure about that RDNA 4 will be chiplet based. There will have to be a way to implement drivers for this. It is essentially SLI on a single card. It just means Apple will have to work harder with the software implementation for windows.
I was thinking of the CPUs themselves with integrated graphics. Yes they are very fast but totally impossible for running Windows natively and Apple I don’t think cares much. Once Intel is phased out then the “problem” is gone. Call me cynical.
Intel collapsing would not be good for any consumer. It is because of AMD competition that there has been a huge upsurge in CPU power over the last 4 years. Prior to that intel was too far out for any competition to touch them. This resulted in years of stagnation. AMD getting zen sorted has woken up the sleeping intel.
There is a huge desire to run windows app on Mac, so Apple won’t be so stupid as to hinder that. What ever they do will not have a dramatic effect on compatibility. That doesn’t mean they can’t release a glitch, but it will be a priority to fix any glitches, should they arrive.
GPU Direct Storage would be great!
But first… we need affordable mid-range GPU´s with normal prices.
At least the prices are way better compared to these absolute insane graphics card prices a year ago.
I have to admit I have never heard the term GPUDirectStorage, but I was rather lazy the last 12 months when it comes to be informed about hardware and have not spend any time studying PC hardware because no computer upgrade is currently needed (except buying a graphics card).
When reading the first posting I assume that “GPUDirectStorage” feature is similar to AMD-SAM.
NVMe itself was a huge leap forward and that is the first real hyperfast drive technology, and it can be made even faster when adding that hyperfast GDDR6 RAM graphics cards are using.
GPUDirectStorage sounds like using the graphics card RAM like it was an SSD buffer.
My understanding is that DirectStorage allows for DMA (direct memory access) transfers from the NVMe drive to the GPU’s VRAM over PCI-E, without an intermediate copy into the CPU’s RAM.
This means what it’s saving isn’t the time it takes to read out of the drive, but the time it takes to copy data into RAM and the time it takes to copy data out of RAM. Which does sound nice? But I’m not sure it would be as impressive as people think.
For most of us mainthread is always the limiting factor and as I see it with DS a considerable amount of bandwidth will be freed up. I imagine it will need at least a 2080 but done right and we should be flying.
Yes. It also includes running the computation to uncompress compressed DXT on the GPU instead of the CPU.
MSFS is very limited, as it appears to be primarily DXT3 at present.
I believe that this is a limited part of what works effectively for asynchronous IO-driven content such as MSFS.
(I also believe that it works effectively in the case of games with mainly staged content, since many scenarios have a fixed load at the start of the area.)
And any hope of upgrading in steps seems like it won’t be possible. What you buy is what you are stuck with. I know some people are waiting to see what happens and if they are stuck with a machine that can’t be upgraded and won’t run windows, they will move over to PC.
