DirectStorage is now available for Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs

Remember when we told you that DirectStorage was coming to Windows 11? Last year in September, Microsoft announced that it was bringing DirectStorage to Windows PCs.

The DirectStorage API is a part of what the company refers to as the Xbox Velocity Architecture, and today the API’s SDK is finally generally available.

That being said, PC games that were designed for Windows can finally ship with the feature, making our lives and gameplay experience so much better.

Microsoft says Windows 11 is the best for gaming

This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games by allowing developers to fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices.

According to the Redmond tech giant, DirectStorage will help to greatly reduce the volume of I/O operations on a device’s storage using parallelization.

Of course, this will essentially help to reduce load times among other related benefits for your beloved video games.

DirectStorage is compatible with Windows 10 devices, but Windows 11 has the latest storage optimizations built-in and is our recommended path for gaming.

While you may see benefits on any kind of storage device, installing games to an NVMe SSD will maximize your IO performance and help you more fully experience the benefits of DirectStorage.

This release of DirectStorage provides developers everything they need to move to a new model of IO for their games, and there’s still work to be done on even more ways to offload work from the CPU.  

GPU decompression is next on the roadmap, a feature that will give developers more control over resources and how hardware is leveraged.

If you too are a developer, you can find all resources related to DirectStorage on the official page.