Well-known complete system benchmarking suite 3DMark is now adding a DirectStorage feature test to its suite of features. This DirectStorage feature test demonstrates the transfer rate of NVMe storage to GPU VRAM (storage-to-scene speed, basically) across three speed tiers: no DirectStorage, DirectStorage, and DirectStorage with GDeflate. Without GDeflate, DirectStorage only increases maximum throughput to about ~5.85 GB/s from 3.38 GB/s— but with GDeflate, that can go as high as 13 GB/s thanks to the magic of file compression.
Essentially, by ensuring your system can adequately perform the steps required to support DirectStorage and GDeflate, your system should be able to pass this 3DMark DirectStorage feature test. You only need an NVMe drive (PCIe 4.0 or newer recommended) and a compatible graphics card. While GDeflate is an open GPU compression standard introduced by Nvidia, nothing is stopping it from running on modern AMD and Intel graphics cards.
Aside from being highlighted in this 3DMark feature test, GDeflate is also the main feature behind "RTX IO," essentially just a souped-up version of DirectStorage that includes support for Vulkan API games alongside DirectX12 titles. Portal Prelude RTX was one of the earliest games demoed with the feature, but RTX IO is also present in other major DirectStorage releases, like Ratchet & Clank.
Interestingly, this feature test shows the surprisingly lenient entry level of DirectStorage and GDeflate support. While GDeflate reaches up to 13 GB/s in storage-to-VRAM operations, the actual DirectStorage cap is still about 5.85 GB/s without any file compression trickery. This is on the low end of PCIe 4.0 drives in read/write speeds, but it places most PCIe 3.0 drives slightly below true DirectStorage spec.
Besides the free update adding the 3DMark DirectStorage feature test, 3DMark has also been updated to include support for the French language and new soundtracks for the Speed Way, Wild Life, and Wild Life Extreme benchmarks. For users who got 3DMark through Steam or Epic Games and also paid for the 3DMark Storage Benchmark DLC, the update should be downloaded and applied automatically—at the latest whenever you next launch 3DMark.
