Ah, DirectStorage. Remember how exciting it was when Microsoft announced — just three years ago! — that it was bringing its fast asset-loading tech from Xbox to PC? We thought loading screens would be a thing of the past and that corridor/elevator loading segments in games would all but disappear with them.
Now, cut to 2025. Only a handful of games use DirectStorage and none of them are groundbreaking in its effect. What happened?
Well, DirectStorage still exists. It’s still out there and developers can make more use of it if they choose to. But there are a number of reasons why that’s not happening. Let’s dive in to see what’s going on.
What is DirectStorage?
Normally, compressed game assets are loaded from the SSD to RAM via the Win32 API. Once in RAM, the CPU then decompresses those assets. The decompressed game assets are then moved from RAM to the graphics card’s VRAM, priming the assets for use in games proper.
DirectStorage for Windows is separate API built into Microsoft’s DirectX 12 platform that’s better optimized for loading files from the SSD, reducing asset load times. It also shifts the task of decompression from the CPU (on RAM) to the GPU (on VRAM), freeing up CPU resources for other tasks while taking fuller advantage of the GPU’s power.
Microsoft
With the GPU powering the loading of assets, there are two big benefits: first, load times are cut down, and second, games can use higher-resolution textures and sounds for improved graphics and audio. The end result is better load times, better looking games, and better frame rates.
DirectStorage was originally implemented on Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S consoles before being ported to gaming PCs in 2022. Microsoft has since updated it a number of times to add onboard GPU compression and better support for slower SSDs and even HDDs.
Why don’t all games use DirectStorage?
DirectStorage sounds great! Shouldn’t it be a no-brainer for developers to implement it and start reaping the benefits of faster load times? Whether a game is big or small, faster is faster. Right? And it’s not like we’d miss loading screens (apart from the helpful gameplay tips).
But in 2025, very few games actually utilize DirectStorage. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2023) was one of the first, followed by Forspoken (2023), Forza Motorsport (2023), and Horizon Forbidden West (2024). But beyond those and a handful of other games, that’s about it.
What gives? Well, it’s important to remember that in terms of gaming software technologies, DirectStorage is still pretty darn new. It’s only been available to developers for two years and change. For comparison, it took ray tracing over six years to become mainstream enough for games to start mandating it, and that was with Nvidia’s juggernaut marketing and hardware divisions driving it forward — and I bet you still don’t use it all that often in games. I know I certainly don’t.
DirectStorage is way less flashy and revolutionary than ray tracing, and it doesn’t have the same kind of push behind it. Expect to wait a while before developers really take it on, let alone it going mainstream.
DirectStorage isn’t that good yet
As much as the early demonstrations of DirectStorage were impressive, and while there’s obvious potential for faster asset loading to fundamentally change gameplay and even game design, it hasn’t proven itself capable of doing that in the real world just yet.
We’ve seen some games use it already, sure, but they haven’t made that much of a difference yet. In some cases, it has even reduced in-game performance (even if loading times were reduced).
Joel Lee / Foundry
That’s not to say DirectStorage can’t (or won’t) get better, be more impactful, and take off as a real improvement. It’d certainly be nice to see a bit of experimentation from developers in how they utilize this technology. But for many developers, it just isn’t worth the investment of time and energy yet.
As soon as someone comes along and shows what’s possible with DierctStorage — for example, absolutely no loading screens in a game that would typically take a long time to load, or faster asset streaming for gameplay that’s impossible with traditional asset loading techniques — it will likely turn heads and catch the attention it needs to take off.
DirectStorage isn’t easy to implement
Even among developers who want to start using DirectStorage, it’s not exactly an easy step to take. DirectStorage is more than just a checkbox that you can tick to enable fast asset loading. It’s a fundamental shift in how a game is designed, with new methods for how assets are packaged, compressed, and decompressed during gameplay.
This means developers need to learn, understand, and master this new paradigm — and that takes time, resources, and practice. When the technology is still largely unproven, that’s energy and brain power that could be better spent elsewhere.
Additionally, developers on PC don’t have the same advantage that Xbox developers have, where they know the exact hardware (i.e., the storage solution) that’s going to be powering the game. On PC, gamers could install the game on a cutting-edge PCIe 5 SSD, or a slower NVMe drive, or a classic SATA SSD, or even a spinning-platter HDD. Although DirectStorage can be used to speed up asset load times for all of these storage types, it can’t work miracles.
Square Enix
In other words, you can’t develop a game with zero loading screens while still supporting hard drives and other incompatibly slow storage — and once you start restricting your game to certain PC hardware, you’re losing out on sales. Few publishers are going to sign off on that.
Not to mention the risk of DirectStorage actually slowing down game performance. Without dedicated decompression hardware on modern graphics cards, the GPU has to dedicate some of its already-sapped resources to handle it. If the game is more GPU-bound than it is bottlenecked by the CPU — a common scenario for many games — then DirectStorage could indeed impact FPS. That’d be especially likely on older and slower hardware, where the potential benefits of DirectStorage would be higher, further complicating its use.
Will DirectStorage ever go mainstream?
The answer to this question is very much up in the air. DirectStorage is a technology that’s widely available on a range of game engines already, so it’s not like developers can’t start using it. But there just isn’t a lot of incentive for them to do so yet.
On the flip side, DirectStorage isn’t going away anytime soon. As today’s generation of consoles matures and more games are made with fast SSDs in mind, developers might begin leaning into faster asset loading as a component of the game’s mechanics and design. If that happens, DirectStorage could become a key component of modern PC gaming.
For now, though, we’re still in that chicken-and-egg stage. It won’t take off until it’s used more often and it won’t be used until it starts taking off. Until someone cracks that shell, we might be here for some time.
Further reading: Don’t miss these Windows 11 settings for PC gamers
Author: Jon Martindale, Contributor, PCWorld
Jon Martindale is a voracious writer and technology fanboy who loves nothing more than digging into the specs of the latest graphics cards, processors, and displays. He's passionate about everything PC, but also enjoys experimenting with AIs, and covering new standing desks that can help avoid his worst posture habits.