When we set out to design the Xbox Series X, we aspired to build our most powerful console ever powered by next generation innovation and delivering consistent, sustained performance never before seen in a console with no compromises. To achieve this goal, we knew we needed to analyze each component of the system, to push beyond the limitations in traditional console performance and design. It was critical in the design of the Xbox Series X to ensure we had a superior balance of power, speed and performance while ensuring no component would constrain the creative ambition of the world’s best creators, empowering them to deliver truly transformative next gen gaming experiences not possible in prior console generations. Microsoft is delighted to partner with NVIDIA to bring the benefits of next-generation I/O to Windows gamers. DirectStorage for Windows will enable games to leverage NVIDIA’s cutting-edge RTX IO and provide game developers with a highly efficient and standard way to get the best possible performance from the GPU and I/O system. With DirectStorage, game sizes are minimized, load times reduced, and virtual worlds are free to become more expansive and detailed, with smooth and seamless streaming.” If a game wishes to have more control over exactly how CPU decompression is performed – integrating with its own job system perhaps, then DSTORAGE_DISABLE_BUILTIN_CPU_DECOMPRESSION, can be specified for NumBuiltInCpuDecompressThreads. When configured in this way, DirectStorage will no longer perform CPU decompression itself. Instead, the title can use the custom decompression queue with the DSTORAGE_GET_REQUEST_FLAG_SELECT_BUILTIN flag to collect decompression work. The game can use the same codec mentioned above to decompress the data, or it can plug in its own GDeflate decompression implementation if it wishes. Forcing CPU Decompression GDeflate is available as a standard GPU decompression option in DirectStorage 1.1—a modern I/O streaming API from Microsoft. We’re looking forward to next-generation game engines benefiting from GDeflate by dramatically reducing loading times. Resource streaming and data compression For those who compete, coach or form the vital support teams around athletes, the Olympic and Paralympic journey is full of emotion, from elation to disappointment and everything in between. Each Games is unique and the postponement of Tokyo 2020, the on-going pandemic and the COVID safe measures at the Games, are just some of the additional factors that will contribute to the waves of emotion that all involved are likely to go through.

Load times. They are the bane of any developer trying to construct a seamless experience.Trying to hide loading in a game by forcing a player to shimmy through narrow passages or take extremely slow elevators breaks immersion.DirectStorage 1.0 improves the data transfer part of this process. Advances in Windows 11 combined with DirectStorage allow developers to make use of the higher bandwidth of NVMe drives. DirectStorage enabled games installed on NVMe drives should expect to see reductions in load times by up to 40%. After enhancing this part of the pipeline, developers will want to improve decompression performance next. For ray-traced 1440p gameplay at high settings, the demands shift another notch up to an RTX 3070/RX 6800 XT and an i5-11600K/Ryzen 5 5600X. Then for users who want to crank all the visuals to the max at 4K resolution, the system requirements jump up to an RTX 4080/RX 7900 XTX and a Core i7-12700K/Ryzen 9 5900X. We will be providing more API specifics and documentation with the release coming soon, here are a few ways developers can start planning now: GPU decompression is supported on all DirectX 12 + Shader Model 6.0 GPUs. However, one of the benefits of DirectStorage 1.1 is that GPU hardware vendors can provide additional optimizations for their hardware, called metacommands. For more information about support for these metacommands from our partners, see the links below. As always, we recommend updating to the latest drivers for your gaming hardware for the best performance.

The four phases of the decompression process are as follows and the EIS Psychology Team will facilitate guidance around ‘Time Zero’ (stage 2) and training on ‘Process the Emotion’ (stage 3): Second, the bitstream within tiles is specifically formatted to expose finer-grained, SIMD-level parallelism. We expect that a cooperative group of threads will process individual tiles, as the group can directly parse the GDeflate bitstream using hardware-accelerated data-parallel operations, commonly available on most SIMD architectures. Experiencing a range of emotions before, during and after the Games is completely normal and in a bid to help athletes and support staff to positively process the emotional experience of the Tokyo 2020 Games, the UK Sports Institute’s (UKSI) Psychology team will be working closely with sports on a post-Games period of Performance Decompression. This applies to those who have attended the Games, and those providing remote support whether technical or operational. We have all been in this together. When we shared our first public release of DirectStorage on Windows to reduce CPU overhead and increase IO throughput, we also shared that GPU decompression was next on our roadmap. We are now in the final stretch of development and plan to release DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Decompression to developers by the end of 2022. This is one of our most highly requested features, so in the meantime, we want to share a sneak peek at what we’ve been up to and what developers can look forward to later this year! For Gamers: What is asset compression and how does GPU decompression change games?To put this in perspective, at this rate, it is possible to fill the entire 24 GBs of frame buffer memory on the high-end NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU in a little over 3 seconds! New DirectStorage API: Standard File I/O APIs were developed more than 30 years ago and are virtually unchanged while storage technology has made significant advancements since then. As we analyzed game data access patterns as well as the latest hardware advancements with SSD technology, we knew we needed to advance the state of the art to put more control in the hands of developers. We added a brand new DirectStorage API to the DirectX family, providing developers with fine grain control of their I/O operations empowering them to establish multiple I/O queues, prioritization and minimizing I/O latency. These direct, low level access APIs ensure developers will be able to take full advantage of the raw I/O performance afforded by the hardware, resulting in virtually eliminating load times or fast travel systems that are just that . . . fast.

In addition to Microsoft releasing DirectStorage 1.1, developers still have to optimize their games to use the new decompression technology, and graphics card manufacturers have to release new versions of their drivers to make it all work. Furthermore, the feature will only be available on hardware that supports DirectX 12 with Shader Model 6.0 or higher, and you will need to update the graphics driver (from AMD, Intel, or Nvidia) to the latest version. Also, 64 KB happens to be the standard tile size for tiled or sparse resources in graphics APIs (DirectX and Vulkan), which makes GDeflate compatible with future on-demand streaming architectures leveraging these API features.This two-level parallelization strategy enables GDeflate implementations to scale easily across a wide range of data-parallel architectures, also providing necessary headroom for supporting future, even wider data-parallel machines without compromising decompression performance. NVIDIA RTX IO supports DirectStorage 1.1 GDeflate is a novel lossless data compression standard optimized for high-throughput decompression on the GPU with deflate-like compression ratios. GDeflate saves CPU cycles by offloading costly decompression operations to the GPU, while saving system interconnect bandwidth and on-disk footprint at the same time. GDeflate compression is inherently data-parallel, which enables greater scalability across a wide range of GPU architectures. It is designed to provide significant bandwidth amplification when loading from the fastest NVMe devices, supporting both bulk-loading and fine-grained streaming scenarios. With Moore’s law ending, we can no longer expect to get “free” performance improvements from serial processors. Surprisingly, the storage requirements are quite decent for a game featuring GPU decompression support. The minimum requirement doesn't even demand an SSD (though the developers do recommend one), requiring just 75GB of hard drive space if you have it. But if you want to play the game at anything higher than low-quality settings, the system requirements suggest that you upgrade to an SSD to do so.

Soon after the SDK release, we will publish Apache 2.0 licensed reference implementations of GDeflate compressors and decompressors, allowing tooling to be integrated with existing asset pipelines. What we need is a GPU-friendly data compression approach that can scale performance as GPUs become wider and more parallel. Custom NVME SSD: The foundation of the Xbox Velocity Architecture is our custom, 1TB NVME SSD, delivering 2.4 GB/s of raw I/O throughput, more than 40x the throughput of Xbox One. Traditional SSDs used in PCs often reduce performance as thermals increase or while performing drive maintenance. The custom NVME SSD in Xbox Series X is designed for consistent, sustained performance as opposed to peak performance. Developers have a guaranteed level of I/O performance at all times and they can reliably design and optimize their games removing the barriers and constraints they have to work around today. This same level of consistent, sustained performance also applies to the Seagate Expandable Storage Card ensuring you have the exact same gameplay experience regardless of where the game resides. With GPU-accelerated GDeflate decompression, the system can deliver effective bandwidth well in excess of what’s possible without applying compression. It is effectively multiplying data throughput by its compression ratio. The CPU remains fully available for performing other important tasks, maximizing system-level performance. Here are a couple of links, the nVidia one has a some flow charts showing the difference, the AMD one has a video embedded from the Computex Keynote. SmartAccess Storage explanation starts at 12:40 on the timeline.

In summary

Now, developers have a better solution. NVIDIA collaborated with Microsoft and IHV partners to develop GDeflate for DirectStorage 1.1, an open standard for GPU compression. The current Game Ready Driver (version 526.47) contains NVIDIA RTX IO technology, including optimizations for GDeflate. GDeflate: An Open GPU Compression Standard