Forspoken tech trailer shows off the power of Microsoft’s DirectStorage

Earlier today at GDC 2022, Luminous Productions released a video showcasing the tech in Forspoken. Simply titled “The Technologies of Forspoken,” it shows off several examples of the game’s impressive graphical features, including DirectStorage. And from what we’ve seen of the title so far, it’s shaping up to be a visual treat. The trailer shows off a lot of aspects regarding the more technical aspects of the game, and there’s quite a bit to glean here.

Forspoken‘s previous trailer showed off various aspects of gameplay, like the snappy and dynamic movement and the wide variety of Magic at your disposal. On the gameplay front, Forspoken looks like a lot of fun, but we still had quite a few questions on the visuals and performance side of things. As well as hoe the game would implement DirectStorage and how much it would benefit the load times.

The power of DirectStorage

DirectStorage seems to be a major benefit to Forspoken, as it offers incredibly fast load times. The first example shown in the trailer was a loading screen for a cutscene. Running the game via an M.2 SSD with DirectStorage led to the scene loaded in just 1.9 seconds. In comparison, running the game from an HDD with DirectStorage took 21.5 seconds. A similar comparison was made with a transition to gameplay, where the load times were 1.7 and 19.9 seconds respectively. Load times on SATA SSDs weren’t too shabby either, being able to load into gameplay in just 3.2 seconds.

From this, it’s clear that DirectStorage gives Forspoken an incredibly massive boost in loading times. Even with the exact times varying from scene to scene, it’s still very fast. The idea that the game could feasibly load an entire scene within a second is very exciting. DirectStorage is able to shave off tens of seconds of waiting time, which is not something to scoff at.

That’s not all the trailer showed off either, as it also showcased many of the features powered by AMD’s FidelityFX. These include ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, a denoiser, variable shading, and FSR 1.0. It’s worth pointing out that AMD also said that Forspoken would support FSR 2.0 following its announcement last week.

These features look great judging from the trailer, and it’ll be interesting to see the game in action when it releases later this year. It’ll be particularly interesting to see how the performance of the game stacks up against its visuals. Until then, Forspoken‘s October 11 release date couldn’t come sooner.