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 used its DirectX "State of the Union" session at GDC 2026 to introduce DirectStorage 1.4, the latest update to its storage API designed to accelerate game asset streaming on Windows PCs. The headline feature is support for Zstandard (Zstd) compression, alongside a new toolset called the Game Asset Conditioning Library, or GACL. If you've never heard of Zstd before, don't feel bad; most haven't. Developed at Facebook (now Meta), Zstd is a modern compression algorithm designed to strike a balance between compression ratio and decompression speed. It's already widely used in places like Linux distributions and cloud infrastructure because it compresses data well but also decompresses extremely quickly, which is a very important trait when you're trying to stream gigabytes of textures and geometry off an SSD while a game is running.…