Microsoft has revealed the minimum PC specifications required to play Forza Motorsport, which includes support for DLSS 2 and FSR 2.2 upscaling technologies. The game can run at native resolutions up to 4K and offers ultrawide resolution support. It also utilizes shader pre-compilation, pre-caching, and DirectStorage for faster loading times. For optimal performance, high-end components such as an Intel Core i7-11700K or Ryzen 7 5800X, an RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XT, and 16GB of RAM are recommended. The game will be available on October 10th for PC and Xbox consoles, with accessibility features and pre-orders now open.
Blizzard has implemented support for Microsoft's DirectStorage in Diablo 4, but it is not yet enabled. DirectStorage is expected to reduce loading times, but may slightly increase CPU usage. The game currently does not require a high-end CPU.
Blizzard's upcoming game, Diablo IV, is planning to enable Microsoft's DirectStorage API in the future, which can fully leverage the higher bandwidth in today's NVMe SSD drives to accelerate load times. Currently, only one game, Forspoken, supports DirectStorage, indicating that the API can be hard for software developers to implement. DirectStorage 1.1 promises to cut down load times even more by leveraging not just the SSD, but also a PC's graphics card to further streamline the game-loading process.
PC gaming is facing stuttering issues due to traversal or loading stutter and shader compilation stutter. Consoles have an advantage over PC due to dedicated hardware decompression processors that result in fewer traversal stutters. DirectStorage is available to PC users, but it just improves loading times and doesn't leverage GPU decompression. Nvidia's proposed Neural Texture Compression (NTC) system could solve the stuttering issues and VRAM hikes plaguing PC gamers by handling compression and decompression of textures directly on the GPU. However, it's just a research paper for now, and it's unclear when it will be brought into graphics cards.
Diablo 4, the hack n slash RPG from Blizzard, supports DirectStorage 1.0 on PC, making it the second triple-A game to do so after Forspoken. The game was stutter-free during its Open Beta phase and required a lot of VRAM for its Max Textures. The NVIDIA RTX4090 can run the game at Native 8K/Max Settings with 40-50fps, and the release version will support DLSS 3. The game will have cosmetic micro-transactions and will be an always-online game without an offline mode.
