You may have seen headlines like “DirectStorage causes 10 percent performance hit on RTX 4090 in Forspoken” or “Careful — Microsoft DirectStorage could kill your frame rate,” all based on a single test from German YouTube channel PC Games Hardware. Microsoft’s new DirectStorage feature is designed to boost load times in PC games massively, but it’s not supposed to tank your all-important frame rates.
So what’s going on? The reality is that the DirectStorage implementation in Forspoken does not affect frame rate performance at all. It’s a case of bad test data.
It appears that PC Games Hardware used CapFrameX to measure performance, a capture and analysis tool based on Intel’s PresentMon. While it’s a popular app used for PC benchmarks, the loading sequences inside Forspoken’s benchmark cause blackscreens with high frame rates that can impact the overall average frame rate.
Because load times are longer on a SATA SSD, these blackscreens are on the screen for longer, impacting the final average frame rate numbers. CapFrameX was quick to point this out on Twitter shortly after the headlines emerged. PC Games Hardware has now pinned a message to its YouTube video comments section, admitting it “did not take into account that a slower SSD has longer loading phases with a black screen that has very high fps” (translated from German).
