Digital Foundry: Even then the game is loading fast. I did a loading test, just between PCs. It is not as fast as PS5, but still it is just under five seconds to load the game from the menu on nearly any modern PC with an NVME drive. It is very fast in comparison to other PC games. Still, what is actually the bottleneck in loading times on PC? Is it the IO-stack there (which even DirectStorage's first version without GPU decompression tries to address) or is it CPU limitations?
Jurjen Katsman: I am not certain if decompression is actually the bottleneck for load times as we did do some things to make decompression go faster, but we backed out on some of those that were hurting the in-game loading (streaming). As in-game (as in streaming while in game, moving around) with those decompression speed-ups in place, we were taking too much CPU away from the game. So we backed that away, and it didn't really meaningfully impact loading screens.
I think other things that do play into it probably is shader compilation that's happening during loading screens, and you mentioned BVH building before, so that is also happening. There's a variety of little things that we do on PC, some of it would be the IO stack... We have some DirectStorage experiments but especially for a loading screen we can use all the CPU for loading, that's what the loading screen is about, right? It's not that suddenly the IO stack change is suddenly going to make it go four times as fast. For in-game purposes, I think that's when when it [Direct Storage] becomes interesting, right when there's this CPU core being fully utilised just to facilitate decompression, freeing up that CPU core if we were able to do that... that would be that's an exciting future, but not where we we're at right now.