• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

Diablo IV Might Already Have Support for Microsoft DirectStorage API

G

GFreeman

News Editor
Staff member
Joined
Mar 6, 2023
Messages
1,928 (2.40/day)
According to dataminers over at Reddit, it appears that Blizzard's Diablo IV might support Microsoft's DirectStorage API, although the developer did not officially announce it. This would make Diablo IV the second AAA title to support this API that should significantly lower loading times on SSD storage. The first title that used DirectStorage was Forspoken. The two files, named dstorage.dll and dstoragecore.dll, suggest that Diablo IV already has support for DirectStorage, or Blizzard is still working on it and it could be available only in the final version of the game.

According to Microsoft, DirectStorage API could reduce the CPU overhead in a game by 20 to 40 percent, when used with an NVMe SSD on Windows 11. Unfortunately, it appears that Diablo IV is also using DirectStorage 1.0 (v1.0.2), just as Forspoken, rather than DirectStorage 1.1 which adds GPU decompression to further speed up the loading process. Diablo IV beta stage is over and the game will officially launch on June 6th on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Xbox S/X. Blizzard already announced that the support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 will be available in the final version, and that ray tracing will be added at a later date as well, so the DirectStorage API could also be on that list.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source
 
I wonder how much of a delta there would be between the beta and the final game in terms of resource consumption.
D4 is quite a resource hog. It will peg several cores (I believe 4 or 5 iirc) to their highest workload capacity. I have noticed no offload to hyperthreaded cores. on my 12900KS it was cores #0, 2, 4, 6 who did all the lifting.

RAM consumption gets wild, often times on a 32GB system it flaxuates between 8GB to 16GB, with times where it allows itself to go overboard and take 18-21GB of system memory which I think Blizzard is aware of and are intending to fix / cap.
VRAM consumption, as with other recent Activision Blizzard games seem to serve mostly for cache purposes. Using a 4070 Ti for this beta I have noticed about 10.5GB of video memory being cached for the game's use on startup. (4K, high preset)
 
Yes, the game stutter like hell, even with 32GB of RAM and an RTX 3080. In 2K resolution it drops down to 20-40fps during battles with a lot of stuff happening on the screen...
 
game has issues, which will be fixed eventually. Regardless it ran great for my on the highest settings on 1440p. looking forward to RT addition.
 
Prima.Vera said:
Yes, the game stutter like hell, even with 32GB of RAM and an RTX 3080. In 2K resolution it drops down to 20-40fps during battles with a lot of stuff happening on the screen...
Click to expand...
I got similar specs as you, the game stutter like hell, changed the texture from high to medium fixed it, I notice when I'm running the game on RTXD 3080ti, it is almost using all my GPU memory.
 
dj-electric said:
I wonder how much of a delta there would be between the beta and the final game in terms of resource consumption.
D4 is quite a resource hog. It will peg several cores (I believe 4 or 5 iirc) to their highest workload capacity. I have noticed no offload to hyperthreaded cores. on my 12900KS it was cores #0, 2, 4, 6 who did all the lifting.

RAM consumption gets wild, often times on a 32GB system it flaxuates between 8GB to 16GB, with times where it allows itself to go overboard and take 18-21GB of system memory which I think Blizzard is aware of and are intending to fix / cap.
VRAM consumption, as with other recent Activision Blizzard games seem to serve mostly for cache purposes. Using a 4070 Ti for this beta I have noticed about 10.5GB of video memory being cached for the game's use on startup. (4K, high preset)
Click to expand...

I did see a fairly even 8 thread usage on my 12100 with FPS uncapped when I was curious what my system can push on max settings.
Thumbnail:
D4maxfps.jpg

For me the beta ran fine, other than the micro stutters in the town rest of the game was pretty smooth no real issues during combat or in dungeons and had zero crashes over the course of both beta weekends.
Highest memory usage was around 13+ gigs on my end, I guess the game just uses up whatever extra resource it has access to in its current state.
 
Last edited:
From what I could tell from the BETA, Diablo IV could sorely use it.

halodies said:
I got similar specs as you, the game stutter like hell, changed the texture from high to medium fixed it, I notice when I'm running the game on RTXD 3080ti, it is almost using all my GPU memory.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I used about 5GB VRAM. The big culprit was the memory leak, all my system RAM was used up, I have 32GB.
 
For me beta worked well only with medium texture setting (rest max / FHD / 144 FPS cap). With High textures it was nearly instant out of memory crash. 6700 XT / 32 GB ram
 
With my 6900XT all the memory was cached/used ( 16gigs ) and system memory 25gigs was used with 0 stutters in game or battles, only when i used townportals in n out
 
Prima.Vera said:
Yes, the game stutter like hell, even with 32GB of RAM and an RTX 3080. In 2K resolution it drops down to 20-40fps during battles with a lot of stuff happening on the screen...
Click to expand...
some of that could be game engine, but I think alot of the problems are network related.
 
Colddecked said:
some of that could be game engine, but I think alot of the problems are network related.
Click to expand...

I noticed it too, maybe they do have net working issue's. With so many people playing or just trying to play as well.

Maybe when the numbers drop some, but the games got some nasty ass bugs.
 
No stutter or glitches with my system playing 4K all details highest.
 
ratirt said:
No stutter or glitches with my system playing 4K all details highest.
Click to expand...
Same as you here, i didnt have any problems at all. I'm on a 5800x3d now with founders 3080TI. I also downloaded the game ready drivers for D4.
 
Either bad engine, or the game really needs more than 10GB of VRAM for the textures on High. Weird.
 
Ran it on an 8GB 1660ti, initially on high but it seemed to be running out of vram and stuttering everywhere. Moved textures down to medium and that cleared up like 90% of the stutter and it played fine. Also played for a bit on a Series X and didn't hit any performance problems at all.
 
I believe the main culprit of the stuttering was the shadows setting. Moved it to medium (at the suggestion of someone on Reddit) and all my stutters went away with everything else at max.

I have a 3080Ti at 3440x1440.
 
Ran fine on my rig outside of the server going down a few times this last weekend. Previous Beta had some issues with crashes from the memory leak. That damn queue was the real monster at times. My longest wait was an hour. Thankfully I didn't preorder so I won't be dealing with that at release. Caught PTSD from dealing with D3 at release. Plus they had issues recently with Overwatch 2 release, so no hope for D4 releasing smoothly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top