Microsoft is changing course and giving gamers a reason to stick with Windows 10

Microsoft’s Windows 11 unveiling in June was accompanied by announcements across the company’s many departments, including a warning from the company’s games division: you’ll need Windows 11 to play games. which use some “next generation” APIs, in particular the new DirectStorage API.

On Friday, the company’s DirectX team lifted this operating system restriction.

“Microsoft is committed to ensuring that when game developers adopt a new API, they can reach as many gamers as possible,” writes Hassan Uraizee, DirectX program manager, explaining that the next DirectStorage API will no longer be exclusive to Windows 11. This statement accompanies Microsoft’s launch of a DirectStorage preview program that will allow developers to immediately begin testing this functionality in heavy 3D software. The API, among other things, redirects I / O calls for 3D graphics resources directly to a computer’s GPU.

How “full” is “full potential”?

Uraizee’s post indicates that another previously announced DirectStorage pillar, a jump to higher-speed SSD storage, has also moved into “optional” territory. Essentially, Microsoft is now claiming that developers can expect any DirectStorage-based game loading pipeline to switch to lower performing PCs while still benefiting from OS-level tweaks, like decompression of assets via GPU, largely aided by DirectX’s Agility SDK, which can be dropped into various versions of Windows (Win10 version 1909 and later) and run without expected conflict with other parts of the operating system. Even so, Windows 11’s “storage stack upgrades” will be exclusive to that operating system, so Uraizee says gamers will want Windows 11 to access the “full potential” of DirectStorage.

But one of DirectStorage’s implicit selling points is the ability to design real-time 3D worlds that revolve around a revolutionized I / O approach, one where open landscapes and detailed elements don’t. no longer have to be hidden by deception by waiting in an elevator or crawling in a narrow passage). Uraizee’s brief explanation doesn’t draw a line in the sand as to how DirectStorage and its Win10 and Win11 variants will or will not accommodate such ambitions for PC gaming.

“DirectStorage compatible games will still perform as well as they always did, even on PCs with older storage hardware (eg hard drives),” he writes, but “as well as ‘they always have’ is a decidedly next-generation description. Once we see more ambitious console exclusives for the Xbox Series X / S and PlayStation 5, whose specs include aggressive SSDs and default I / O, we’ll see if Uraizee’s optimism applies. to the PC ports of these games on slower storage systems.

Either way, this is a step back from previous Microsoft announcements regarding DirectStorage. Maybe Microsoft noticed how many PCs from interested gamers failed last month’s Windows 11 compatibility test, either due to a lack of solid-state media or a motherboard that failed the checksum checks. Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and was quick to ensure that its DirectX 12 Ultimate ambitions are no longer limited. Already, DX12U requires more modern GPUs, including Nvidia’s RTX 2000 and 3000 families and AMD’s RDNA 2 line, and in a world of chip scarcity, adoption of compatible GPUs has been slow.