If you own an NVMe SSD and a DirectX 12 GPUGPU. Graphics Processing Unit — the chip that renders the game's visuals; the main driver of framerate and image quality., a slice of Microsoft’s storage stack has been sitting dormant on your machine for years, waiting for games to call on it. In 2026, that wait is starting to look a little less lonely.
DirectStorage is shipping in more games than at any point since its PC launch in 2022, a public preview of version 1.4 with a new decompression codec is out, and mainstream engines now expose it. The catch: the gap between games that ship the files and games that visibly use the technology remains wide. This piece catalogs who is actually implementing it, how it works, and what side-by-side testing shows when it does.
What changed
The DirectStorage story started on console. Microsoft built it into the Xbox Series X|S in 2020 as part of what it calls the Velocity Architecture, where a custom NVMe SSD, Sampler Feedback Streaming, and a dedicated hardware decompression block work together to stream world data without loading screens. The PC port of the API arrived in 2022, and for a long time the roster of games using it was embarrassingly short.
Here is how the confirmed roll call has grown:
- Forspoken (January 2023) — the first PC game with DirectStorage, built on Square Enix’s Luminous Engine.
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (July 2023) — Insomniac’s platformer, designed around near-instant dimension streaming.
- Forza Motorsport (October 2023) — the first Microsoft first-party PC release to use it.
- Horizon Forbidden West (March 2024) — shipped with the API but notably skipped its headline feature, GPU decompression.
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2025) — the latest Insomniac port to join the list.
- Final Fantasy XVI and Star Wars Outlaws have also been reported among PC titles using later DirectStorage versions, though public confirmation of GPU decompression varies by title.
SteamDB tracks dozens of entries that bundle DirectStorage SDK files, but that count is misleading. Titles like Diablo IV, New World, and EA Sports FC 24 include the files without any confirmed, measurable use of the streaming path. Including the SDK is not the same as building your asset pipeline on the API.
The other big change is version cadence. After 1.1 added GPU decompression and 1.2 (2023) refined it, Microsoft released a public preview of DirectStorage 1.4 in March 2026, which adds Zstandard (Zstd) support — an open, widely used compression codec with strong decompression throughput — alongside the GDeflate format introduced in 1.1. Zstd matters because it gives engine teams a compression option their existing tools may already support, lowering one of the integration hurdles.
How it works
Two distinct bottlenecks strangle traditional game loading, and DirectStorage attacks both.
Bottleneck one: request overhead. The file I/O APIs Windows games have used for decades were designed for mechanical hard drives. Modern games don’t read a few large sequential files; they fire off thousands of small requests per second to stream textures, geometry, and audio as you move. Each request carries operating-system overhead, and at NVMe request rates the CPU spends a surprising share of its budget just managing the queue. DirectStorage lets games batch those requests into large submissions, cutting the per-request cost dramatically.
Bottleneck two: decompression. To keep install sizes manageable, almost every asset on your SSD is compressed. In the legacy path, the CPU has to unpack gigabytes of data and stage it in RAM before the GPU ever sees it. DirectStorage 1.1’s answer is GDeflate — a parallel-friendly compression format originally developed by Nvidia and contributed as an open standard — which lets the GPU decompress assets directly on the way into VRAMVRAM. Video RAM — memory on the graphics card used for textures and frames; more of it lets you run higher settings.. GPUs are built from thousands of small cores doing repetitive parallel work; unpacking compressed blocks is exactly that kind of job. Microsoft’s technical demos have shown high-end GPUs delivering several times the effective decompression bandwidth of a top-tier desktop CPU.
The system requirements are modest on paper. You need Windows 10 (version 1909 or newer) or Windows 11, an NVMe SSD, and a DirectX 12 GPU with Shader Model 6.0 support — which covers most discrete GPUs from the last several years. Two details matter for full effect: Windows 11 includes the optimized BypassIO storage path, and DirectX 12 Ultimate-class hardware gets the most from GPU decompression. The drive should typically use the Windows “Standard NVM Express Controller” driver; some vendor-specific drivers have been reported to block the fast path. If everything lines up, the API activates automatically — there is no toggle.
What the load tests show
The honest answer is “it depends on who implemented it.”
Forspoken remains the cleanest advertisement for the raw pipeline: loading times around one to two seconds. But deeper testing showed something awkward — a fast Gen5 SSD barely outperformed a SATA SSD in that game. The pipeline got so efficient that the storage device stopped being the constraint almost entirely, which both validates the technology and undercuts the pitch for buying a pricier drive.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart showed the downside of a botched first attempt. ComputerBase found that deleting the two DirectStorage DLLs from the game’s directory gave an RTX 4080 roughly 10% higher average FPSframerate. How many images (frames) the game shows per second; higher = smoother motion. 60 fps is a common target. at 4K and about 26% improvement in 1% lows — with no penalty to loading times. GPU decompression was spending silicon budget that the renderer wanted back. Patches and an Nvidia driver hotfix improved things, but the incident exposed the core tradeoff of DirectStorage on PC.
Horizon Forbidden West made the same point by omission. Nixxes, the porting studio with the most DirectStorage experience on the planet, shipped it with the API but deliberately disabled GPU decompression, citing API restrictions and driver scheduling issues it could not resolve. When the specialists opt out of the marquee feature, that is data.
On Xbox, none of this tradeoff exists — a dedicated hardware decompression block does the work for free. PC buyers do not have that silicon, so every second saved in loading is borrowed from the frame-rate budget. The pattern across 2023–2025 titles crystallized into a rule: DirectStorage works visibly when the engine is built around it from the start (Ratchet & Clank’s dimension jumps), and is nearly invisible when it is bolted on later.
That is why engine-level support is the 2026 inflection point worth watching. Unreal EngineUnreal Engine. A widely-used commercial game engine from Epic Games; powers many large-studio (AAA) games. UE5 is the current generation. 5, whose Nanite virtualized geometry and Virtual Shadow Maps are designed to stream enormous data volumes, exposes DirectStorage to PC projects, and Unity has added support as well. Pair that with DirectStorage 1.4’s more approachable Zstd codec, and the engineering cost of doing it properly keeps dropping.
What it means
For PC builders right now, the advice is simple: do not buy hardware for DirectStorage. Any NVMe SSD you own already qualifies, a PCIe 4.0 drive captures most of the benefit the current crop of games can use, and the API has no effect on games that don’t implement it — which is still the large majority of the catalog. Frame rates during gameplay are unaffected; what improves is load time, fast travel, and streaming smoothness in the handful of titles designed for it.
For the industry, the trajectory has finally bent upward. The 2026 pipeline pairs a maturing API — now on its 1.4 preview with a friendlier codec — with the engine support that was missing in 2022–2024. What the technology still lacks is its defining title: a game so visibly built around instant streaming that other studios have to follow. Until that lands, DirectStorage stays worth watching rather than worth buying for.