If confirmed, we hope that DirectStorage will deliver happier results than Forspoken, which should serve as a technical showcase in that sense. Contrary to Microsoft’s promises, the title Luminous Productions does not show any significant improvement in loading times.
Worse, a patch introduced by the studio improved much-needed performance, but at the cost of said load times. However, it should be noted that Forspoken was using version 1.0 of DirectStorage.
Microsoft has in fact subsequently provided a version 1.1 which notably includes decompression by the graphics card instead of the processor for improved optimization. But again, if we are to believe the data mined for Diablo IV, the files mention a version 1.0.2.
However, there are still two short months until the game is released, which Blizzard could use to actually implement the famous version 1.1 of DirectStorage. Hoping that in this case it will also work on Windows 10, since Microsoft’s technology is a priori capable of optimizing loading times … but prefers Windows 11.