Direct Storage Support

[Ninjuhturdel]

Brief question, does 7Days PC version currently support Direct Storage on Win 10/11 and if not, are there plans to support it in the future? I'm currently running SATA SSD drives, but considering upgrading to an NVMe. Support for this game is one of the deciding factors of the purchase. It's not a huge performance boost to the system, but my aging CPU would certainly benefit from reduced load when playing this game. 

 

Thanks!

[Pernicious]

7d2d is based on the unity engine, which does not yet support direct storage.

 

Given the amount of work to convert it to do so, it could be a while off yet, if ever.

[SylenThunder]

Yeah, it might maybe be an option after the game releases. I am not sure how much it would help a game of this nature though since most of the lifting is done by the CPU.

 

 

 

41 minutes ago, Pernicious said:

7d2d is based on the unity engine, which does not yet support direct storage.

 

Given the amount of work to convert it to do so, it could be a while off yet, if ever.

 

Also just to confirm the above statement, this is a direct response from Unity when this was asked about back in March.

Quote

 

We are planning to investigate which areas of the engine would benefit from it and how much effort it would be to implement.

 

Unfortunately, DirectStorage not simple to implement. While the API is pretty straightforward, 90% of the benefit that you get from it is from restructuring how the engine ingests data. It's not unlike the shift from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12. So even if we decide to do this, it will take some time.

 

 

[Ninjuhturdel]

1 minute ago, SylenThunder said:

Yeah, it might maybe be an option after the game releases. I am not sure how much it would help a game of this nature though since most of the lifting is done by the CPU.

 

 

 

 

Also just to confirm the above statement, this is a direct response from Unity when this was asked about back in March.

 

Thanks for the info. The CPU doing the heavy lifting is actually why this feature would be nice, it removes the CPU from the equation when the GPU is accessing data from storage. (Hence the name) It circumvents the CPU and allows the GPU to directly access storage

[SylenThunder]

1 minute ago, Ninjuhturdel said:

Thanks for the info. The CPU doing the heavy lifting is actually why this feature would be nice, it removes the CPU from the equation when the GPU is accessing data from storage. (Hence the name) It circumvents the CPU and allows the GPU to directly access storage

Yes, but that isn't happening a lot in the case of this game. The majority of the lifting is already done when the game is loaded and textures are stored in VRAM. 

 

Based on my observances of the client behavior over the years, you're only going to see maybe a 5% improvement in extreme cases as a result of this technology with a game like this. For something like Ark, it would be significantly more beneficial.

 

The major lifting in the game is loading all of the voxel data from storage, calculating SI, entities, pathing, and more from that data. Additionally the intense I/O load as it is constantly reading and writing large amounts of data to storage. 

 

So then the question becomes whether the overall benefit for the end user compared to the amount of development time to implement such technology is financially worth it. And truly if low-end systems are only going to maybe see a very small percentage, then it likely is not worth the effort.  Time would be better spent on focusing how the game is processing the intense CPU functions, and widening multi-core support.

[Fanatical_Meat]

Fataal answered this question a little while ago.

Unity doesn’t support it and he has heard no talk of it being supported in unity. He also didn’t think loading assets faster would be a big improvement.

Info below.