Tuesday, March 28th 2023
Diablo IV Might Already Have Support for Microsoft DirectStorage API
According to dataminers over at Reddit, it appears that Blizzard's Diablo IV might support Microsoft's DirectStorage API, although the developer did not officially announce it. This would make Diablo IV the second AAA title to support this API that should significantly lower loading times on SSD storage. The first title that used DirectStorage was Forspoken. The two files, named dstorage.dll and dstoragecore.dll, suggest that Diablo IV already has support for DirectStorage, or Blizzard is still working on it and it could be available only in the final version of the game.
According to Microsoft, DirectStorage API could reduce the CPU overhead in a game by 20 to 40 percent, when used with an NVMe SSD on Windows 11. Unfortunately, it appears that Diablo IV is also using DirectStorage 1.0 (v1.0.2), just as Forspoken, rather than DirectStorage 1.1 which adds GPU decompression to further speed up the loading process. Diablo IV beta stage is over and the game will officially launch on June 6th on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Xbox S/X. Blizzard already announced that the support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 will be available in the final version, and that ray tracing will be added at a later date as well, so the DirectStorage API could also be on that list.
Source:
Reddit
According to Microsoft, DirectStorage API could reduce the CPU overhead in a game by 20 to 40 percent, when used with an NVMe SSD on Windows 11. Unfortunately, it appears that Diablo IV is also using DirectStorage 1.0 (v1.0.2), just as Forspoken, rather than DirectStorage 1.1 which adds GPU decompression to further speed up the loading process. Diablo IV beta stage is over and the game will officially launch on June 6th on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Xbox S/X. Blizzard already announced that the support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 will be available in the final version, and that ray tracing will be added at a later date as well, so the DirectStorage API could also be on that list.
19 Comments on Diablo IV Might Already Have Support for Microsoft DirectStorage API
D4 is quite a resource hog. It will peg several cores (I believe 4 or 5 iirc) to their highest workload capacity. I have noticed no offload to hyperthreaded cores. on my 12900KS it was cores #0, 2, 4, 6 who did all the lifting.
RAM consumption gets wild, often times on a 32GB system it flaxuates between 8GB to 16GB, with times where it allows itself to go overboard and take 18-21GB of system memory which I think Blizzard is aware of and are intending to fix / cap.
VRAM consumption, as with other recent Activision Blizzard games seem to serve mostly for cache purposes. Using a 4070 Ti for this beta I have noticed about 10.5GB of video memory being cached for the game's use on startup. (4K, high preset)
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For me the beta ran fine, other than the micro stutters in the town rest of the game was pretty smooth no real issues during combat or in dungeons and had zero crashes over the course of both beta weekends.
Highest memory usage was around 13+ gigs on my end, I guess the game just uses up whatever extra resource it has access to in its current state.
Maybe when the numbers drop some, but the games got some nasty ass bugs.
I have a 3080Ti at 3440x1440.