Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Microsoft first announced DirectStorage for PC back in 2020, with Forspoken being the first game to officially support it in early 2023. However, it wasn’t until Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was released later that year that we saw the full DirectStorage suite in action. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was the first title to ship with GDeflate compression and support for GPU decompression of assets – a task that had previously been the responsibility of the CPU. In theory, this should have facilitated more seamless streaming of assets with smoother performance, as the feature aimed to reduce the CPU bottleneck associated with the decompression of assets during gameplay. In practice, the opposite happened, in particular on Nvidia GPUs. DirectStorage on PC aims to bring many of the benefits of the fast storage technology used in the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.…