With the speed that high-end PC components have reached, the quality of games designed to take advantage of them (ie, not those designed with the limitations of consoles in mind) can be nothing short of spectacular. More realistic and complex textures, more realistic lighting, frame rates and resolutions unthinkable a few years ago… the qualitative leap is undeniableand the experience provided by these games is, to use the language of the sector, triple A.
A very clear example of this can be found in Unreal Engine 5, the game development engine and environment from Epic Games that already left us speechless with The Matrix Awakens, and that points to titles in which we will rediscover the feeling of “getting into” a game. At a high cost, yes, because Unreal Engine 5 is particularly demanding when it comes to resources, as we could already see after the release, by Epic Games, of the Megacity Sample Project with Lumen, Nanite and Metahumans. If Microsoft Flight Simulator seemed too demanding to us (and it is), Unreal Engine 5 could raise the bar even higher.
As a general rule we can say that the performance of a system is determined by its components, something that seems obvious ad nauseam, but there is a second factor, also very important, and that is the way in which they interact with each other, as well as the processes that govern these interactions. And it is that it is of little use to have the best components, if it later turns out that the way in which they work together is not optimized or could be more so.
A perfect example of the possibility of process improvement is the one raised by Microsoft with DirectStoragea technology that eliminates the bottleneck caused by the CPU in the processes of loading textures from an NVMe SSD unit to the GPU, whose arrival on PC was announced at the Windows 11 presentation, and which according to some tests can reduce load times by up to a staggering 70%.
Last March, Microsoft released the DirectStorage API for developers, thus kicking off its implementation in new developments. And today we know, from NeoWin, that DirectStorage support will be integrated directly into Unreal Engine 5. There is still no scheduled date (at least publicly) for it, but we do know that they are already working on it, which is excellent news for the world of PC gaming.
have already occurred some announcements about future titles to be developed with Unreal Engine 5like the installment of the Tomb Raider saga that Crystal Dynamics is working on, so this step was very important, both to encourage more developers to use DirectStorage, and so that players can get much more out of the components of their systems.
