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DirectStorage on Wine/Proton (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by Mystify0771@kbin.social to c/linux_gaming@kbin.social

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Blizzard recently announced that they will be enabling DirectStorage for Diablo 4 in the future.
Will gaming on Wine support this feature as new games start to enable it?

As far as I understand there are two benefits DirectStorage has, one is making load times faster while using less CPU resources and another one allows the GPU to almost entirely bypass the CPU and use the storage directly. Hopefully the first feature would be easier to implement because it doesn't need the GPU drivers.
Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty and Starfield are two upcoming games that require SSD to play, presumably because of DirectStorage, curious to see what will the performance be like on Linux using Wine

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[–] falsem@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Reading about it in the past:

It's just a DLL that already works fine through WINE.
Linux storage IO is already a lot faster than Windows so this is more about Windows playing catchup.

another one allows the GPU to almost entirely bypass the CPU and use the storage directly

IIRC that's a console only feature. The Windows version is pretty neutered in comparison.

[–] LoafyLemon@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Linux has had this nifty feature since Kernel 2.6 known as GPUDirect, which is essentially the equivalent of DirectStorage on Linux.

The marketing hype around DirectStorage suggests that it's a fresh Windows feature, but in reality, it's just a substantial fix aimed at tackling the sluggish IO performance on Windows due to the design flaws.

https://heterodb.github.io/pg-strom/ssd2gpu/

It remains to be seen if Wine can hook DirectStorage into GPUDirect.