Diablo IV could feature DirectStorage support, according to datamining findings
Diablo IV open beta has come and gone, revealing some positive and also some negative aspects that Blizzard might want to take into consideration. Even though the open beta allowed players to explore only the first act, the game required more than 80 GB with all the high res textures. This size immediately raised some dataminer eyebrows, and sure enough, it looks like Blizzard might be preparing some interesting features for the final version. Dataminer Any_Bowler_2317 on reddit reported 2 weeks ago that the Diablo IV closed beta files included references to Nvidia's DLSS as well as Microsoft’s DirectStorage. Nvidia released DLSS support for the open beta after just one week, so we can expect DirectStorage to be implemented for release maybe.
The DirectStorage API promises to harness the high bandwidth of an NVMe SSD in order to reduce gaming load times and even work in conjunction with the GPU to speed up asset decompression. However, this new API has been implemented in only one other game - Forspoken - up until now. Admittedly, the loading time benefits are there for NVMe SSDs, but Forspoken does not support GPU decompression, which only comes with DirectStorage 1.1. From what was revealed with the Diablo IV datamining, Blizzard included DirectStorage version 1.0.2.
Hopefully, Blizzard can find the time to implement the GPU decompression side in the next few months before the full release, yet, even if this does not come right out of the gate, at least players can benefit from DLSS.
