Well, I don’t know if I find this article well worded.
The game will run on a hard drive, but this one is for 2023 standards, very low resolution and frame rate. For 1080p 60fps, which is now really the minimum, the SSD requirements have already passed. Also pay attention to the listed settings. It has already gone from very low to medium. In many modern games, averaging is often possible without much loss. Low and very low usually indicate that you’re really sacrificing too much for effects and texture accuracy.

This is exactly the point of DirectStorage. This bypasses the ever-growing bottleneck in games, getting data to the GPU for specifically things like high quality and complexity of textures, effects like particle effects and certainly also ray tracing. The CPU is very slow to unpack them into such assets, but with DirectStorage these assets go to the GPU in still-encapsulated form where they are only unpacked there. This saves bandwidth over the PCIe bus, so more data can be transferred, and the GPU makes it dump much faster.

But note that this development also means that the GPU itself needs more data storage capacity for unpacked assets, and thus more VRAM. Something to definitely watch out for. After all, now that the CPU bottleneck of getting data to GPU VRAM has been resolved, another jump in VRAM capacity requirements may follow.

Bottom line I suspect this game will also work on a hard drive to be able to sell the game to more people. After all, many people still have fairly old video cards, in part because the GPU market has actually been pretty bad for five years, especially in the lower segments.

But I don’t think the experience will be good. I actually see this as a coming argument for why so many gamers should slowly migrate to an NVME SSD and paint the consequences on the rest of your PC. It’s just something a lot of people probably can’t afford due to, among other things, the high prices of desirable video cards with more than 8GB of VRAM, for example.

In addition, it will also be interesting how fast exactly the NVME SSD should be. Forget the always advertised sequential read speeds that are rarely relevant. These are random read speeds that you usually have to look up in reviews. It must have a certain speed, depending on the resolution and frame rate, in order to supply enough data to the GPU. But how fast is the question exactly.

[Reactie gewijzigd door DaniëlWW2 op 15 juli 2023 16:13]