No, Microsoft DirectStorage isn’t slashing RTX 4090 performance by 10 percent

Image: Microsoft

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.

I saw the headlines and immediately started testing Forspoken