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.
