Forspoken will run 10% slower on PC if you enable DirectStorage

Forspoken, one of the first-ever DirectStorage titles on PC, has shown that it might run up to 10% slower with the brand-new feature turned on.

DirectStorage is being healed as one of the next greatest innovations in PC gaming. Still, with the first officially-supported DirectStorage game out and in the hands of gamers worldwide, something a little curious has cropped up.

Forspoken‘s lofty system requirements aside, it appears that the engine scales to lower-end hardware, with one user even running the game with a GTX 970, a GPU that is almost a decade old. With that in mind, Forspoken also boasts all manner of higher-end features too, including DLSS, FSR, Ray Tracing, and DirectStorage.

Benchmarks from the German website PC Games Hardware tested Forspoken at 4K using several different storage devices and found the following results.

Forspoken DirectStorage benchmark

The following benchmarks were tested using an RTX 4090, alongside an Intel Core i9-12900k at 4K resolution.

The results are interesting, as it showcases that enabling DirectStorage can lower performance at 4K by around 10%. However, what we do not know is how the gameplay experience is affected by this, or what tangible benefits DirectStorage employs until we test it for ourselves.

Regardless, it’s a title that is laden with some technological issues, so we’re going to wait and see what other future DirectStorage titles have on offer to retain final judgment to see if the speediness in loading times is really worth the jump to enabling it.

You can use DirectStorange on NVMe SSDs, however certain ones, like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G are built with DirectStorage in mind, and it remains to be seen if this new hardware will manage to match consumer expectations over a normal PCIe 4.0 stick, instead.