DirectStorage Won’t Need Windows 11, It Just Likes It Better

About Face!

Microsoft have changed their minds about yet another piece of Windows 11, and the news is good for those planning on sticking with Windows 10.  Initially Microsoft announced that DirectStorage, as found on the new XBox, would be added to Windows 11 exclusively and to benefit from it you would need to upgrade your system when the new OS arrives.

This seems to no longer be the case, as a new dev blog post indicates that Windows 10 1909 and later will be able to make some use of it though not as effectively as Windows 11 will.  The post also mentions that games programmed with DirectStorage will run without issue on older versions, they just won’t benefit from the optimizations.

If you run a machine with an NVMe SSD, a GPU which supports DirectX 12 Ultimate such as an NVIDIA RTX 20xx card or an AMD RX 6000x and Windows 10 1909 or newer, you will be able to benefit from DirectStorage.  That will allow your storage subsystem to take advantage of DX12-style batched submission/completion instead of individual I/O requests and improve the speed of GPU decompression for loading and streaming. 

If you run Windows 11, the storage improvements are touted to be even better, as the OS was designed with DirectStorage  in mind, though it is early days to tell just what that will mean and what differences you would see between Win10 and Win11.