Will the sim support the new Microsoft DirectStorage API that is supported on the Xbox series consoles??
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It might eventually, but that’s probably a ways away. I wouldn’t expect it this year.
I would assume it would come with the directs 12 update.
It will be nice to have load times significantly reduced. My 980 pro sad and 3090 should nice and quick.
If you have the money in the budget, I’d recommend getting an name drive ahead of time if you don’t have one now. There will be a big rush on them the closer windows 11 gets
Will it make much of a difference? Most terrain is procedurally generated and/or comes from the net.
Disk access is very low while flying. I’m flying right now and disk access is below 300 bytes per second. while net traffic is about 250kb per second. It varies yet disk access is in the hundreds, net access in the hundred thousands. (And I’m not over PG areas where it is 5x more net data again)
DirectStorage is for loading textures directly from disk to the GPU, not really applicable for FS2020. I guess loading the planes could be a bit faster.
^^^
This
It may help a bit loading up some textures when flying in non-PG areas where the textures are stored locally, but even with it enabled, I wouldn’t expect to see a very noticeable difference. I guess we’ll see down the road. Since this will be a DX12 feature, we won’t be getting that for a while. DX12 will likely be SU6 or 7 in September or November. Whether or not they include Direct Storage out of the gate is anyone’s guess.
Depending on the hardware, today it takes way more than a minute, minute and a half for the game to start. Several minutes for people on slow HDDs and plenty of extensions.
There are two operations involved: reading from the disk and decrypting content.
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I don’t know the intricacies of DirectStorage, but if the decryption could be done by the GPU instead of the CPU it would surely cut loading times considerably…
The majority of the data you’re loading at game start isn’t textures. It’s the core game, add-ons (community and official), decryption, and other data. That’s what takes time to load.
DirectStorage applies to transferring textures from an NVMe SSD to VRAM on your GPU. It allows textures to be loaded directly to VRAM from the SSD without having to through the CPU and / or system RAM first, making video textures load faster.
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Crunch,
I think what is confusing some of us is that our GPU is running 50-85% or more while our CPU is idling around 15 % during program load. Although my system is rather low end, I am getting a decent 15-25 FPS most of the time after flight sim starts.
By looking at the task manager, it just appears that our CPU is not doing much to assist loading the program. It is almost like the CPU says..Here GPU, here is a pile of work for you while I finish my pina-colada…smile.. Sometime, the startup is so slow it makes one wonder if anything is happening.
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That’s because those startup screens aren’t optimized and hammer the GPU at 100%, just like the main menus and world map screens. The GPU isn’t loading anything. Everything the GPU needs is already loaded at that point.
Now in task mananger, if you view your CPU by logical processors vs overall CPU while loading, you’ll notice that 1 thread will be at or near 100%. It seems that while the sim itself is nicely multi-threaded, the loading process isn’t. That’s why we’re seeing overall CPU usage so low.
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Yes this is also what I see, 1 CPU logical thread maxed during loading time, meaning before reaching the menus proper.
I was hoping DirectStorage would offload some of the decrypting calculations to the GPU for NVME, but if it’s textures send to NVRAM during gameplay, then the benefits on loading time are not that great.
Textures aren’t encrypted, they are just compressed.
Nothing has been confirmed for short term/future, so as of today, the answer is no.
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