Continuing with news from GDC 2022, Square Enix studios developing Forspoken relieved that they are applying the DirectStorage API for the game and can take advantage of the speedy read/write that is already being powered on on Xbox and soon arrives on PC Games.

Luminous Productions, one of Square Enix first party studios, confirmed at their GDC 2022 presentation that another of the reasons to delay Forspoken was to not only polish more the game, but to include DirectStorage capacity.

For those who still don’t know, DirectStorage is a functionality that at the API level that allows a system to decompose elements of graphic processes instead of being analyzed by the CPU and sent decrypted to the GPU, the GPU receives this task directly, allowing the CPU more space for other tasks.

The API was one of the big advances Microsoft gave the Xbox Series X originally.

In simple words, a process and game read and write speed that equates to more performance without more effort.

With that in mind, and while no footage was shown (ony screenshots from in-game engine), the studio managed to get Forspoken loaded cutscenes at 1.9 second and gameplay examples clocked 1.7 seconds and 2.2 seconds.

Interestingly, the studio didn’t have data on how the game performs without DirectStorage but acknowledges that in the case of Hard Disk Drives, the game could struggle as testing with DirectStorage seems to be enough for not publicly supporting it.

For PC gamers, HDD is no longer cutting it for proper storage and not for just the physical difference with SSD, but is that data read and write can no longer be optimized as per games nowadays requirements.