New DirectStorage drivers trashes PS5 Kraken I/O

[Lince_SPAIN]

It's common knowledge among console devs that the PS5 Kraken ASIC (in extremely rare optimal conditions) can achieve a max throughput of 22 GB/s while streaming textures and other assets, since texture data cannot be always fully optimized the throughput is usually 15-18 GB/s. TLOU PS5 uses this to free the CPU from the burden of unpacking textures so the game runs silky smooth at all times.

On the other hand, PC platform has seen improvements with regard to DirectStorage GPU decompression, nowadays PC can hit a 33 GB/s throughput even with unoptimized assets. I wonder why Naughty Dog dumped everything on the CPU while ignoring modern and elegant PC features like this one, it should fix the tremendous CPU bottleneck in TLOU PC instantly, why are they reluctant to implent this as an option? Aren't we PC users paying full price the same as console gamers? What do we deserve here?

Nvidia has increased the performance of RTX IO/GPU decompression

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/143exaj/nvidia_has_increased_the_performance_of_rtx_iogpu/

NVMe 4.0 and 5.0 hitting the theoretical max throughput of the PS5 I/O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU6p4KcQblQ

[Axiom]

Because they don't want to leave out the massive number of PC users that still run a HDD or sata SSD, not to mention Steam Decks which don't support DS unless Windows is used.

The PS5 doesn't have this problem.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by Beloretral:

Because they don't want to leave out the massive number of PC users that still run a HDD or sata SSD, not to mention Steam Decks which don't support DS unless Windows is used.

The PS5 doesn't have this problem.

DirectStorage 1.2 is compatible with HDD and Sata SSD. Apart from that, they can always implement it as an option and at least offer the best possible version of the game that those on outdated hardware will be able to enjoy at some point when they upgrade.

To say that they offer the absolute worst version of the PC port just because some users are still running hard disk drives is unacceptable and plain and simple gaslighting. Imagine if PS5 and Xbox games wouldn't ship with 4K support and Home Theater audio just because some users are still on 1080p panels and stereo headphones, how would users paying full price for their games react? It's just PC gamers and their low standards conditioned and willing to accept any lazy and late crumbles coming from devs and still willing to praise them for that.

[animal_PLANET]

SONY consoles do not use DirectX. Also, only 1 game currently supports Direct Storage.

ND would of had to do some extreme overhaul of the API. That would of taken a long time. To do that for a console port is not feasible. Unless they were going to make it from the ground up for PC. It wouldnt make sense to do it.

Since its still a new feature and only 1 game currently supports it for PC. It will be a long time until it becomes implemented on a wider scale. You wont see it more until SONY uses DirectX, but they may never do it since they already have their own tools that work really well.

Also, A HDD really isnt going to work with Direct Storage. Its way too slow IOPS and only around 100MB/s read. No point in getting them to work with Direct Storage as it was built strictly for NVMe. Where speeds are now going well over 7K MB/s. HDD will have no benefir what so ever.

Lastly, there is no current bottleneck with CPU for this game. I am averaging around 38-48% usage on a 9900K. Which is now 5 years old CPU. If you are experiencing a bottleneck its probably time to upgrade or manage your system better to bring overall usage down.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

SONY consoles do not use DirectX. Also, only 1 game currently supports Direct Storage.

ND would of had to do some extreme overhaul of the API. That would of taken a long time. To do that for a console port is not feasible. Unless they were going to make it from the ground up for PC. It wouldnt make sense to do it.

Since its still a new feature and only 1 game currently supports it for PC. It will be a long time until it becomes implemented on a wider scale. You wont see it more until SONY uses DirectX, but they may never do it since they already have tools that work really well on their own.

Lastly, there is no current bottleneck with CPU for this game. I am averaging around 38-48% usage on a 9900K. Which is now 5 years old CPU. If you are experiencing a bottleneck its probably time to upgrade or manage your system better to bring overall usage down.

Sorry but saying that the game has no CPU bottleneck and that your 9900K 48% usage means that there's no such bottleneck shows you don't know what you're talking about. No offense intended but maybe you should educate yourself on what a CPU bottleneck means and how it impacts TLOU PC.

[animal_PLANET]

Originally posted by Lince_SPAIN:

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

SONY consoles do not use DirectX. Also, only 1 game currently supports Direct Storage.

ND would of had to do some extreme overhaul of the API. That would of taken a long time. To do that for a console port is not feasible. Unless they were going to make it from the ground up for PC. It wouldnt make sense to do it.

Since its still a new feature and only 1 game currently supports it for PC. It will be a long time until it becomes implemented on a wider scale. You wont see it more until SONY uses DirectX, but they may never do it since they already have tools that work really well on their own.

Lastly, there is no current bottleneck with CPU for this game. I am averaging around 38-48% usage on a 9900K. Which is now 5 years old CPU. If you are experiencing a bottleneck its probably time to upgrade or manage your system better to bring overall usage down.

Sorry but saying that the game has no CPU bottleneck and that your 9900K 48% usage means that there's no such bottleneck shows you don't know what you're talking about. No offense intended but maybe you should educate yourself on what a CPU bottleneck means and how it impacts TLOU PC.

Ah yes. A quick response that says nothing. That CPU usage is far from a bottleneck. Especially when data is till being handled at a very high level and GPU usage goes well over 95%.

So please. Before making a rant thread. At least know somewhat about the topic you are speaking of.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

Originally posted by Lince_SPAIN:

Sorry but saying that the game has no CPU bottleneck and that your 9900K 48% usage means that there's no such bottleneck shows you don't know what you're talking about. No offense intended but maybe you should educate yourself on what a CPU bottleneck means and how it impacts TLOU PC.

Ah yes. A quick response that says nothing. That CPU usage is far from a bottleneck. Especially when data is till being handled at a very high level and GPU usage goes well over 95%.

So please. Before making a rant thread. At least know somewhat about the topic you are speaking of.

The game is being CPU bottlenecked at most places throughout the game, texture data is being unpacked on the CPU and this takes a toll on performance, there's tons of instances in the game when the engine is unpacking and streaming assets into the VRAM buffer where a modern above average GPU won't hit anywhere 100% usage no matter what CPU is running the game, this is textbook CPU bottleneck. Go and watch DF videos on TLOU PC, they will be an eye-opener for you.

[episoder]

who knows what data set they used. bandwidth totally depends on the compression ratio of the asset. this could be fake numbers. clean... you get 8 GB/s for gen 4 and 13 GB/s for gen 5. i'm not into watching that rn, anyway. tea break

[animal_PLANET]

Originally posted by Lince_SPAIN:

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

Ah yes. A quick response that says nothing. That CPU usage is far from a bottleneck. Especially when data is till being handled at a very high level and GPU usage goes well over 95%.

So please. Before making a rant thread. At least know somewhat about the topic you are speaking of.

The game is being CPU bottlenecked at most places throughout the game, texture data is being unpacked on the CPU and this takes a toll on performance, there's tons of instances in the game when the engine is unpacking and streaming assets into the VRAM buffer where a modern above average GPU won't hit anywhere 100% usage no matter what CPU is running the game, this is textbook CPU bottleneck. Go and watch DF videos on TLOU PC, they will be an eye-opener for you.

Maybe on your potato it bottlenecks. I for one have completely stable FPS and FT throughout. No dips in 19 hours of gameplay.

If CPU was bottlenecking at any point I would notice GPU usage go down as CPU can not send data fast enough. It does not. All this was shown via afterburner.

So you are wrong that this game bottlenecks and cleary dont fully understand the terms you are usung.

Dont be mad at the community and go on a pointless rant because you cant run the game. Its not our fault. Dont take it out on us. We cant help you.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

Dont be mad at the community and go on a pointless rant because you cant run the game. Its not our fault. Dont take it out on us. We cant help you.

what is that you consider a potato CPU ? according to you what is the minimum CPU that wouldn't bottleneck this game ?

[jedimindtrickonyou]

If the tech is so important to you, why not just spend $500 on a PS5 and get access to it? It’s ok to own a PC and a PS5, it won’t be a betrayal of the master race. It’s really clear that developers aren’t interested in DirectStorage, only Forspoken did it and they didn’t even use GPU decompression, only for faster load times. Luminous was a unique studio in that they were specifically interested in the intersection of technology and gaming. Who knows when we will see a proper DirectStorage title ship using all the features? Probably not soon, unfortunately. Just look at the reaction you get when you make these posts, our fellow PC gamers don’t even seem to care about it or are making excuses against why devs should implement the feature. I would like to see it being used in PC games too, but the forecast looks gloomy for DirectStorage on PC, and it’s definitely not getting patched into TLOU at this point.

[Xengre]

Originally posted by animal_PLANET:

SONY consoles do not use DirectX. Also, only 1 game currently supports Direct Storage.

ND would of had to do some extreme overhaul of the API. That would of taken a long time. To do that for a console port is not feasible. Unless they were going to make it from the ground up for PC. It wouldnt make sense to do it.

Since its still a new feature and only 1 game currently supports it for PC. It will be a long time until it becomes implemented on a wider scale. You wont see it more until SONY uses DirectX, but they may never do it since they already have their own tools that work really well.

Also, A HDD really isnt going to work with Direct Storage. Its way too slow IOPS and only around 100MB/s read. No point in getting them to work with Direct Storage as it was built strictly for NVMe. Where speeds are now going well over 7K MB/s. HDD will have no benefir what so ever.

Lastly, there is no current bottleneck with CPU for this game. I am averaging around 38-48% usage on a 9900K. Which is now 5 years old CPU. If you are experiencing a bottleneck its probably time to upgrade or manage your system better to bring overall usage down.

As you said, ND likely felt like it wasn't worth it and likely never even considered DirectStorage's existence to begin with as it is still relatively quite new. Once loaded the benefits would be of questionable merit, anyways, as the streaming system is fine thus mainly loading a game or on death reloading an area could be impacted and those already aren't a huge deal unless you are dying a ton.

Worth pointing out that HDD will work just fine with DirectStorage and while it will not see the huge benefits it will still function just fine so HDDs are not a negative point of mention. See for more info https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-1-2-available-now/

As for the CPU bottleneck aspect, Lince_Spain is actually correct. The game is typically going to be CPU or GPU bottlenecked, of which unless you set the settings too high for your GPU is likely going to be CPU first for most people and, in fact, Naughty Dog has released multiple patches for this issue and still continued to receive reports of their CPUs being crushed by the game despite patches.

48% usage on a 9900K is not evidence of no bottleneck. What you actually got to look at is if single threads are being caped at or near 99%. If they are you are being bottlenecked by a single thread which most games are primarily single-thread bottlenecked if bottlenecked at all by CPU which is why you will almost never use the general overall CPU usage % to gauge a CPU bottleneck (even for The Last of Us which actually has much greater multi-threading utilization than most PC games).

Obviously, if you are hitting 99% on your GPU at your max potential settings and increasing graphical settings further keeps it at 99% GPU while dropping FPS lower than you are running into a GPU bottleneck first.

Which category you fall into you would have to look at your system based on that to determine and I'm only stating so you know for your own proper use in the future.

OP, keep in mind the DirectStorage optimizations by Nvidia benefit primarily PCIe 5 and not 4, unfortunately, otherwise typical user will cap at around 22 GB/s or less (not that this isn't still amazing). Sadly, it will probably be at least another 1-2 years before we start seeing increased utilization of DirectStorage and so far we've only seen Forspoken's which didn't even use the full feature with the GPU decompression relying on CPU decompression at the time.

[AmaiAmai]

1. No dev would waste time implementing features a small subset of people will use vs actually fixing hard issues in a product for everyone first.

2. Theoretical and benchmarks don't usually pan out in reality and no dev would waste their time implementing or testing unproven technology.

3. PS5 will likely still have an advantage in reality because it is a target system that doesn't change or has little variation. PC is a different story where many buggy interactions exist that may alter performance, unlike a controlled test -- which is why benchmarking programs are largely useless.