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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Implement DirectStorage to Ashes of Creation?
Hrothgor
Member
Greetings,
the new DirectStorage API is out now and upcoming PCIe vers.5 NVMe are right around the corner... With UE5 and an early adoption of DS can Intrepid be a massive pioneer in the gaming industry.
What do you think about it? Is it worth to risk a 3-6 month delay until the game comes out, in order to bring the lastes technology to Ashes of Creation, for a smoother gameplay?
the new DirectStorage API is out now and upcoming PCIe vers.5 NVMe are right around the corner... With UE5 and an early adoption of DS can Intrepid be a massive pioneer in the gaming industry.
What do you think about it? Is it worth to risk a 3-6 month delay until the game comes out, in order to bring the lastes technology to Ashes of Creation, for a smoother gameplay?
4
Comments
The thing with technology is that it keeps on evolving and that too in very short periods of time which while good for consumers is annoying for developers if asked to change things constantly. Moving to new technologies and delaying the release will make it so that the game is never released. At some point Steven will have to say no and stick to whatever technology is currently being used to develop AoC. These things can be done at a later point too as AoC is mostly player driven rather than content driven like WoW and has a lot of meaningful horizontal progression associated with it which are good time sinks as well.
Otherwise, you just have vaporware.
UE5 will continue adding new cool APIs. Eventually, we will have UE6 and UE7.
First, "DirectStorage requires an SSD that conforms to the NVMe standard" (from WindowsCentral.com)
CORRECTION: "Also, unlike previously reported, you don't necessarily need an NVMe-based storage device, such as an M.2 SSD with PCIe/NVMe interface. Even a SATA SSD with AHCI protocol will do. Microsoft is, however, recommending the use of an NVMe SSD for the best performance. "
Second (from Toms Hardware article today):
"Unfortunately, a crucial element of the tech - at least when it comes to gaming - isn't being included in this API release version as yet. In the announcement blog, Microsoft explained that GPU decompression still is't baked in, despite being next on the company's roadmap. That is likely the single most important element for gaming scenarios, which will allow game developers to take advantage of GPU's shading performance and advanced parallelism to directly decompress game assets. This provides the added benefits of freeing up CPU cycles that would otherwise be responsible for the decompression routines (freeing it up for other performance-sensitive duties), whilst also reducing data shuffling between storage, operating memory, the CPU and the GPU. That feature not being available as yet means that IO performance can still be improved due to the revised storage subsystem, but leaves a lot of performance on the table - and still requires the CPU to do the heavy-lifting in decompressing game world data."
The absence of the actual gaming improvements mentioned above means it's not quite ready for prime time and I hate to be a Microsoft-basher but until its done, it ain't done so don't count on it.
Hey! You took my line! >:(
I like new tech like this, so sure, if it's easy to implement, go for it. It boosts performance for people with SATA SSD's a little bit, but it massively improves I/O for those with NVME SSD's. By the time the game releases, I think almost every single player will at least have a SATA SSD, and a big chunk will run NVME.
For example, implementing FSR 2.0 in the game is apparently completely free and pretty easy. A matter of days if what I read is correct. It's already a UE5 plugin and is thus easy to do. It also really helps users with older hardware get better performance. Well, the exception to ease of implementation would be if Intrepid for some reason already chose not to support DLSS, which uses similar temporal upscaling tech. This was already present in UE4 though, so I expect that to be in the current version as well.
From this article we can see it's likely also coming to UE5 in the future: https://www.neowin.net/news/epic-games-confirms-microsoft-directstorage-support-is-coming-to-unreal-engine-5-ue5/
If, like FSR 2.0, it becomes easy to implement to a point where it only takes a few days, I see zero reason not to go for it. To me that's not scope creep, that's just keeping up with the times. If it starts requiring a months work or so, yeah, perhaps delay until after release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlf2I1TYd8U
However, if one of you see any sort of benchmark or video detailing how it affects improved/increased draw distances and loading of objects, please post it here.
I am hoping DirectStorage will drastically increase detailed viewing distance, and let us see 300 players at once in the siege when turning around, instead of culling it down to the nearest 100 after which the rest will pop in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8taBd7EO2Dc