Forspoken, one of the first DirectStorage games for PC, has shown that with a completely new feature enabled, it can run 10% slower.
DirectStorage is regarded as one of the next greatest innovations in computer games. However, with the release of the first game with official DirectStorage support, which fell into the hands of gamers around the world, something curious has appeared.
Aside from the high system requirements of Forspoken, it looks like the engine is scaling up to lower-end hardware, and one user even ran the game with a GTX 970, a GPU that’s almost a decade old. With that in mind, Forspoken also boasts all sorts of higher-level features, including DLSS, FSR, Ray Tracing, and DirectStorage.
Tests from the German PC Games Hardware website tested Forspoken in 4K resolution using several different storage devices and gave the following results.
Forspoken DirectStorage Test
The following tests were tested using RTX 4090 along with Intel Core i9-12900k at 4K resolution.
| Storage Device | Average FPS |
| SATA SSD (DirectStorage off) | 83.2 |
| PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD | 75.3 |
| PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD | 74.4 |
The results are interesting because they demonstrate that enabling DirectStorage can reduce performance at 4K resolution by about 10%. However, we don’t know how this affects the gameplay or what tangible benefits DirectStorage uses until we test it on ourselves.
Be that as it may, this title has some technological issues, so we’re going to wait and see what other future DirectStorage games offer to keep the final judgment to see if the download speed is really worth it to include it. .
You can use DirectStorange on NVMe solid-state drives, however, some of them, such as the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, are created with DirectStorage in mind, and it remains to be seen whether this new hardware will be able to meet consumer expectations compared to a regular PCIe 4.0 drive instead.
