DirectStorage for gaming!!!

Direct storage is a technology for NVME SSD's only. There's no such thing as a 'Super fast hard drive' in the 21st century. Hard drives are slow and mechanical. Price wise for mass storage they're still good, but not for modern games.

Plus, they're no where near as reliable. There's a reason why they're now called 'spinning rust'.

Hello dear Gamer, it's a pleasure to help you today.

My name is Lucas O

I am a gamer and expert on the XBOX platform.

Welcome to the community.

Unfortunately no official information was releseased yet about directstorage on older generations

No one here has that information, you would have to address that to Bethesda directly. I would recommend that you put it on your fastest drive due to the number of assets that need to be loaded regardless of whether it supports direct storage. As there is about three games that support it right now, you should be fine

how long is too slow tho? a millisecond? a couple seconds? i'm fine with slower loading times and longer loading screens if it means i can actually have my games installed, the internal storage is about 800gb then the expansion cards cost from half to the same amount as the console, i'm fine if it means my games will have slower loading times if it means i can go buy a 5 TB hard drive to have modern games on when modern games take up about 100gbs minimum atm, i just wanna know why it isn't optional, like why? its a worse user experience in my opinion

It may be a little bit complicated to understand but it's not just about the games being slower to load. Essentially, Xbox Series X games are coded differently to previous Xbox games that used be loaded on slow mechanical hard drives.

Xbox Series X games have much larger complex textures than those from the previous generation of consoles. External hard drives are made up of a platter of spinning discs with read/write heads, the technology of these drives back to the 1980's.

The Xbox Series X uses its GPU to load textures faster. The console's custom DirectStorage API allows the GPU to directly access the SSD without going through the CPU. This reduces the amount of CPU overhead and allows the GPU to load textures more quickly.

In addition to using its GPU for texture loading, the Xbox Series X also uses its custom hardware decompression blocks (HDBs) to decompress textures on the fly. This further reduces the amount of CPU overhead and allows the GPU to load textures even faster.

As a result of these enhancements, the Xbox Series X can load textures significantly faster than previous consoles. This allows for more detailed textures, smoother gameplay, and shorter loading times.

Because mechanical hard drives are far too slow, the Series can't use it's custom architecture to load games faster.

In addition to these new techniques, Xbox Series X games also use new file formats that are more efficient than the file formats used on previous consoles. This further reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored on the drive and improves the performance of the game.

As a result of these changes, Xbox Series X games cannot run on mechanical hard drives. These drives are simply not fast enough to keep up with the demands of the new games.

The problem I have with indie games, is that you get very "samey" games in waves. By that I mean when Minecraft got released, all of a sudden every man and their dog was releasing some sort of "Minecrafty" game.

Now were in the winter of "Survival Horror" games (brought on by Day Z) and literally every man and their dog is doing a "Survival Horror" game.

I wonder what the next big thing in indie games will be, possibly something to do with gravity or time travel I'll bet.