AMD is working on Smart Access Storage for faster game loading

AMD announces Smart Access Storage. That is a technique for Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs that should improve loading times of games and streaming textures. The technology will work with games that support Microsoft’s DirectStorage API.

Smart Access Storage should optimize the cooperation between cpu, gpu and storage and make it possible, for example, to perform decompression on the gpu. Then the extracted textures end up in the vram instead of in the working memory of the CPU, after which they would have to go over the tight PCIe bus in an unpacked and thus larger state. Only unpacking on the video card could speed up loading times, according to AMD.

AMD has not yet released any details about the precise operation of Smart Access Storage, but does make it clear that the technology works on the basis of Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, which is part of DirectX 12. AMD adds with its implementation ‘own technologies and GPU decompression,” the company said.

AMD will be announcing more about Smart Access Storage in the coming months. It seems that games need to support the feature in order to take advantage of it. The same goes for Microsoft’s DirectStorage. That technology is used on the Xbox Series consoles and is also available for Windows, but no Windows games have appeared that use it yet.