Bright Studio’ Spoken is out on PC and a big reason for its anticipation among fans and enthusiasts was the debut of Microsoft’s DirectStorage API. This feature promises huge performance improvements over legacy technology and initial tests show very impressive results indeed.
While previous coverage focused on improvements in loading times, some further testing by YouTube channel Compusemble has included details such as disk usage and disk speed, which shows the percentage of SSD controller usage and disk data read speed. shows. This also gives us an idea of how DirectStorage can affect frame pacing. And just like load times, within frame times Spoken Technology has also improved considerably as a result. The result is a generally stutter-free experience even when playing assets on the fly.
The images below are examples of instances when the game is streaming in data but the frame pacing is fairly smooth and also characterized by large spikes in the frame time graph. One of the scenes below captures data at 830.7MB/s but frame times are fairly smooth.
While credit for this performance goes to Direct Storage, some of it is also due to the latest generation PCIe 5.0 SSD used in this test. The YouTuber says it used a Gen5 Engineering prototype NVMe SSD with a Phison E26 controller.
However, despite the positives, there are definitely aspects of the game that could use a bit more polishing. For example, the screenshots below show a sequence of scenes where Chapter 2 “stuck” loads. As you might notice, it exhibits some very noticeable frame-time spikes and takes about eight seconds to load. This is despite the fact that read speeds aren’t really that high as the Gen5 SSD is capable of doing here, so suggests there may be issues elsewhere in the optimization pipeline.
Perhaps the biggest complaint one could have. SpokenThe DirectStorage implementation of Windows 10 is the absence of this feature. However, Microsoft has already confirmed that Windows 11 includes “additional optimizations to the IO stack” which could mean that the new OS would have been a better choice anyway.
Source: Composable (Youtube)
