Developer of upcoming tech showcase game forspoken claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach. Last Monday, Microsoft declared that directstorage would usher in’a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games’.

The square Enix title will actually load some scenes in one second flat. A NVMe SSD capable of over 5,000mb/sec reads can be over 5,000mb/sec.

Forspoken took 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds, and 2.2 seconds to get us there. The way directstorage offloads the streaming of visuals from the CPU to the GPU.

Directstorage in forspoken is only removing one of the big I/O bottlenecks – others exist on the CPU.

Hdds are not delivering the anticipated result due to hardware performance limitations,’ says Ono.’we’ve been hoping that HDDs will bring enhanced performance with regular spinning hard drives,’ he says.

The data transfer speeds of directstorage are clearly faster for SSDs. They could improve it in future if they take full advantage of GPU’s decompression.

Most PC games do n’t take anywhere near as much advantage of speedy NVMe SSD as forspoken. Most games have loading times of over 10 seconds.

With forspoken, Ono says they’re using other techniques to speed up load times. The game is loaded in advance while you’re on the title screen screen.