According to Microsoft, offloading the decompression of assets to the graphics card can boost gaming performance as much as three times because it allows the CPU to take care of other game processes. Modern games require a significant amount of data to create the realistic worlds and universes that gamers experience. To enable the processor to work at its optimum performance, all of this data must be loaded from storage into memory. The explosion of massive, dynamic open-world environments and living, persistent worlds with increased density and variety has only increased the amount of data required. From environmental mesh data, high polygon character models, high resolution textures, animation data, audio and video source files and more all combine together to deliver the most immersive game play environment for the player. RichardtST said:Y'all are just slow and need to learn how to code. DangerZone has been doing instant dimension changes for years. In java. On spinny drives. On Intel Core 2 duo. With integrated graphics. When properly applied, the KISS PRINCIPLE (along with a heaping helping of cleverness) can do absolute wonders.Assuming you're talking about this DangerZone (https://www.orespawn.com/), then this comparison is just silly. Rather than thinking in terms of compressing files, it is better to think about compressing streams. For this reason, the DirectStorage SDK does not ship with a standalone tool for compressing files. Instances of the IDStorageCompressionCodec interface can be used for this. Use DStorageCreateCompressionCodec with DSTORAGE_COMPRESSION_FORMAT_GDEFLATE to obtain an instance of the GDeflate codec. This can be used to compress (and decompress) streams. See the MiniArchive project in the BulkLoadDemo sample for an example of this in action. Compressing Assets on non-Windows platforms

GPU: Any DirectX 12 capable GPU that supports Shader Model 6.0 will be able to take advantage of the new feature, we recommend a DX12 Ultimate capable card. We will be providing more API specifics and documentation with the release coming soon, here are a few ways developers can start planning now:Make sure to measure the impact that different resource types have on compression savings and GPU decompression performance.

However, a note I would say is in previous games, any semblance of warping or shifting instantly was likely because that part of the level exists, it's just in a place you would never normally get to. Source engine games for instance have a maximum map size of about 2048 feet in all directions (although this somewhat misleading, since the map size is 32,768 units in each direction and the defacto scale is 16 units = 1 foot). You can fit a lot of stuff in that volume. Knowledge of how GDeflate works can inform decisions about appropriate stream sizes. First, GDeflate splits the uncompressed stream into 64 KiB-sized tiles. Each tile is compressed separately. This provides the first level of parallelism – for CPU decompression, each tile can be decompressed by a different thread, and for GPU decompression, each tile can be decompressed by a single thread group. For the second level of parallelism, GDeflate arranges the data within a tile so that multiple lanes within a thread group can work in parallel on decompressing that tile. When we shared our first public release of DirectStorage on Windows to reduce CPU overhead and increase IO throughput, we also shared that GPU decompression was next on our roadmap. We are now in the final stretch of development and plan to release DirectStorage 1.1 with GPU Decompression to developers by the end of 2022. This is one of our most highly requested features, so in the meantime, we want to share a sneak peek at what we’ve been up to and what developers can look forward to later this year! For Gamers: What is asset compression and how does GPU decompression change games?First, the original data stream is segmented into 64 KB tiles, which are processed independently. This coarse-grained decomposition provides thread-level parallelism, enabling multiple tiles to be processed concurrently on multiple cores of the target processor. This also enables random access to the compressed data at tile granularity. For example, a streaming engine may request a sparse set of tiles to be decompressed in accordance with the required working set for a given frame. When released, we will provide an update to the DirectStorage SDK that provides everything developers need to get started with GPU decompression. Included with the SDK will be: Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/news/directstorage-on-intel-gpus.html With a new compression format, tooling, and drivers in hand, developers will have the key ingredients to architect their engines to take advantage of GPU decompression.