With WoW being so CPU reliant, most players likely have a much underutilized GPU. Adding directstorage to the game would provide a huge bump for people in that situation.
Will Directstorage be added to WoW?
That’s not how that would work.
As it’s not announced then it won’t be there anytime soon.
This is not what I was asking about lol. Go read the wiki I guess.
It’s implemented on a per game basis and DF is brand new. It should have it given the AAA studio and scope of the game.
The point is, no matter what they add to the old engine, it will give minimal increase in performance.
It’s a brand new technology, so there is no way for you to know that lol. This isn’t what I was asking!!! Go back to GD if you want to veer every thread off topic. Read thread topic, that’s the question. I’m looking for an actual answer.
DirectStorage helps with loading assets directly into GPU VRAM bypassing the RAM and CPU that handles it. WoW doesn’t have lots of high-fidelity assets to load and for the most part, the limiting factors in-game are the raster GPU (new zones, widefield view) or single-core CPU performance (complex world state, like during mass combat). All it would do is maybe make Dalaran load a bit quicker on selected supported systems.
It was not announced for DF so it won’t be there anytime soon. At best they will announce it sometime during DF. DXR and variable rate shading were announced before their implementation/testing feasibility.
Yep pretty much hit the nail on the head. WoW’s asset loading just isn’t that demanding on texture bandwidth, since they are all under 2k textures. Due to how quickly they load, I honestly can’t even tell if they bother streaming in lower mips first, while the rest of the texture is loaded. Even if you’re on an extremely entry level NVMe that’s only pulling ~1GB/s, you can pretty much fully saturate the texture pools in seconds. If someone’s Dalaran load time was 5 seconds before, it might drop to like 3.5 seconds. The bulk of the loading screen would still be CPU and network bound.
Though the new DirectStorage 1.1 looks like it might be a little more promising. A general rule of thumb, when it comes to new features like this: If Epic Games hasn’t put it into Unreal Engine yet, it’s probably not worth it yet.
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This is good info, thanks.
Anything they can throw at this old engine will help, and maybe all of it combined will actually give a decent boost to performance.
Throwing in tech that improves IO/GPU performance might help a little, but it would just be slammed with hard diminishing returns on gains. It would likely help a bit though with 1% lows, maybe bump them up by 25%. MMOs are brutal on single thread performance and that’s pretty much always going to be the main limiting factor, assuming you have a GPU and storage device that are adequate for the game.
By far the defining factor in my load times is how many / which addons I have enabled, and I don’t see DirectStorage doing anything to help with that.
Loading with no addons is already pretty snappy IMO.
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