DirectStorage is Microsoft's API for loading game assets from fast storage with less CPU overhead, using GPU-based decompression - per Microsoft's own documentation. It does not state a specific minimum PCIe generation on the PC side. The one DirectStorage-specific benchmark we can cite (a Forspoken test reported by Tom's Hardware) found Gen4 and Gen5 drives essentially tied, with the real gap sitting between Gen3 and Gen4. Adoption remains limited - one manufacturer's own count put shipped titles at four, as of its writing.
Updated · Microsoft documentation checked 16 September 2026
"The DirectStorage APIs are designed to remove most of the operating system's overhead by closely interacting with the underlying NVMe hardware. This allows for achieving a higher bandwidth with lower CPU usage... The main design goal for DirectStorage is to allow a title to sustain 50K IOPS and only use between 5% and 10% of a single CPU core." Console storage minimum: "The new minimum performance guarantee is 2.0 GB/s over a 250 ms window for raw data."
Microsoft's own console (Xbox Series X|S) GDK documentation - this page explicitly scopes itself to consoles: "This article provides an overview of the DirectStorage APIs for Xbox Series X|S consoles only." Historical context Microsoft gives in the same doc: Xbox One/One S guaranteed 40 MB/s minimum, Xbox One X raised that to 60 MB/s.
Read the source →That documentation is Microsoft's own Xbox console-side overview, and it says so explicitly: it scopes itself to "Xbox Series X|S consoles only." For the PC side, Microsoft directs developers to its own DirectStorage GitHub repository:
"DirectStorage is a feature intended to allow games to make full use of high-speed storage (such as NVMe SSDs) that can deliver multiple gigabytes a second of small (eg 64kb) data reads with minimal CPU overhead." On GPU decompression: "DirectStorage supports decompressing built-in formats... using the GPU which frees up the CPU for other tasks."
Microsoft's own first-party PC/Windows-side DirectStorage documentation (the repository Microsoft's own SDK download page links developers to). States storage "such as NVMe SSDs" without naming a specific minimum PCIe generation as a hard requirement.
Read the source →Read together: DirectStorage's purpose is reducing the CPU and OS overhead of loading game data from storage, and using the GPU rather than the CPU to decompress that data once it arrives. Neither Microsoft document we could locate states a specific minimum PCIe generation for PC storage - the Xbox-console document states a raw-throughput guarantee (2.0 GB/s over a 250ms window) for that fixed platform, and the PC-side documentation describes the target storage only as "high-speed storage (such as NVMe SSDs)."
"It looks like the difference between PCIe Gen3 and PCIe Gen5 drives may not be that significant with DirectStorage, according to load times from a built-in Forspoken benchmark." The full Gen3-to-Gen5 gap across the benchmark totalled roughly three seconds; Gen4-vs-Gen5 specifically showed no meaningful difference.
Reporting on a Forspoken (a game with a built-in DirectStorage benchmark) test by YouTube channel Compusemble, comparing a PCIe Gen3 Adata XPG SX8200 Pro against a Gen5 Phison E26-based reference SSD. Corroborated independently the same week by Guru3d, HotHardware and NotebookCheck, all describing the same underlying benchmark and reaching the same conclusion: the Gen3-to-Gen4 step matters far more than Gen4-to-Gen5 for this specific DirectStorage title.
Read the source →Forspoken ships with a built-in DirectStorage benchmark, which makes it one of the few titles where a Gen3-vs-Gen4-vs-Gen5 DirectStorage comparison has actually been published. The reported result runs against the assumption a buyer might reasonably make: that a DirectStorage title would show the generation gap most clearly. Instead, per this citation, the measured gap sits mostly between Gen3 and Gen4, not Gen4 and Gen5 - the same shape found in the non-DirectStorage game-load testing covered on our Gen4-vs-Gen5 page.
"At the time of writing, three years after DirectStorage was originally unveiled, four games have shipped with DirectStorage support: Forspoken, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, and Forza Motorsport."
Corsair's own count of shipped titles as of its writing, presented here as one manufacturer's tally rather than an official Microsoft figure or a current count - DirectStorage adoption may have changed since. Corsair's own framing: "The problem for Microsoft DirectStorage is very few games support it."
Read the source →We are labelling this explicitly as one manufacturer's own count, taken at an unstated date on the page itself (confirmed still live via the Wayback Machine as of 10 December 2025), not a current or official Microsoft tally. Adoption may have changed since. Corsair's own framing of why is direct: "very few games support it... games say they will support DirectStorage, but they don't launch with support, and still haven't implemented support months later."
Two things the cited evidence actually supports, stated no further than that: first, DirectStorage does not appear to require Gen5 storage specifically - Microsoft's own documentation does not state a PCIe-generation floor, and the one DirectStorage benchmark we could cite found Gen4 performing essentially the same as Gen5. Second, DirectStorage support remains limited across the game catalogue as a whole, per the one adoption count we could source - so a drive purchase decision made specifically "for DirectStorage" is, on this evidence, deciding for a small and not-yet-settled slice of what you'll actually play.
Neither pick is chosen for a DirectStorage-specific reason - see the case above for why.
| Drive | Gen | Capacity | Cache | Price | $/GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corsair MP600 CORE XT 2TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD | Gen4 | 2TB | DRAM | $219.50 | $0.110 | Buy Now |
| WD WD_Black SN8100 4TB NVMe SSD | Gen5 | 4TB | DRAM | $699.99 | $0.175 | Buy Now |
Gen4 vs Gen5, the full case · Thermals and heatsinks · Back to the gaming SSD hub
A Microsoft API that lets games read asset data from fast storage with much less operating-system and CPU overhead than the traditional file-loading path. Microsoft's own Xbox documentation states the design goal directly: "allow a title to sustain 50K IOPS and only use between 5% and 10% of a single CPU core."
Not per any Microsoft documentation we could locate. Microsoft's own PC-side documentation (the DirectStorage GitHub repository) describes the storage target as "high-speed storage (such as NVMe SSDs)" without naming a minimum PCIe generation. Microsoft's Xbox-console documentation states a raw-throughput minimum guarantee (2.0 GB/s over a 250ms window) rather than a generation requirement.
Yes, for decompression. Microsoft's own DirectStorage GitHub documentation states: "DirectStorage supports decompressing built-in formats... using the GPU which frees up the CPU for other tasks." A CPU decompression path also exists for certain request types, per the same documentation.
As of one manufacturer's own count (Corsair, count taken at an unstated date, confirmed live via Wayback Machine as of 10 December 2025): four games had shipped with DirectStorage support - Forspoken, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, and Forza Motorsport. This is one source's tally at one point in time, not a current or official Microsoft figure, and should be read as such.
The one DirectStorage-specific benchmark we can cite - Tom's Hardware's reporting on a Forspoken test - found the opposite of what marketing might suggest: the full gap between Gen3 and Gen5 across the whole benchmark totalled roughly three seconds, with Gen4 and Gen5 essentially tied. See the citation above for the exact framing.
The evidence we can cite does not support that as a reason on its own. The one DirectStorage benchmark cited above found no meaningful Gen4-to-Gen5 difference, and Microsoft's own documentation does not state a PCIe-generation requirement. See our Gen4-vs-Gen5 page for the fuller price-versus-measurement case.