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NVIDIA announces RTX I/O - PCIe 4.0, on-GPU storage decompression, collaberating with Microsoft on DirectStorage

Earvin Infinity

Earvin Infinity

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Oct 27, 2017
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www.nvidia.com

Introducing NVIDIA RTX IO: GPU-Accelerated Storage Technology For The Next Generation of Games

Load instantaneously, experience vast worlds with endless views and rich detail, and further improve gameplay by leveraging the power of GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards and NVIDIA RTX IO.
www.nvidia.com
"Microsoft is delighted to partner with NVIDIA to bring the benefits of next generation I/O to Windows gamers. DirectStorage for Windows will let games leverage NVIDIA's cutting-edge RTX IO and provide game developers with a highly efficient and standard way to get the best possible performance from the GPU and I/O system. With DirectStorage, game sizes are minimized, load times reduced, and virtual worlds are free to become more expansive and detailed, with smooth & seamless streaming." - Bryan Langley - Group Program Manager for Windows Graphics and Gaming

How NVIDIA RTX IO Works
NVIDIA RTX IO plugs into Microsoft's upcoming DirectStorage API, which is a next-generation storage architecture designed specifically for gaming PCs equipped with state-of-the-art NVMe SSDs, and the complex workloads that modern games require. Together, the streamlined and parallelized APIs, specifically tailored for games, allow dramatically reduced IO overhead and maximize performance/bandwidth from NVMe SSD to your RTX IO-enabled GPU.

Specifically, NVIDIA RTX IO brings GPU-based lossless decompression, allowing reads through DirectStorage to remain compressed while being delivered to the GPU for decompression. This removes the load from the CPU, moving the data from storage to the GPU in its more efficient, compressed form, and improving I/O performance by a factor of 2.

GeForce RTX GPUs are capable of decompression performance beyond the limits of even Gen4 SSDs, offloading dozens of CPU cores' worth of work to deliver maximum overall system performance for next generation games.
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mentallyinept

mentallyinept

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Oct 25, 2017
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Needed to happen for PCs to not be CPU bottlenecked for next-gen games, glad it's happening.
 
thuway

thuway

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Oct 27, 2017
5,168
3080 will be mine.

I got a bad feeling that 3080ti will hit the moment I get it though.
 
aisback

aisback

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Oct 27, 2017
8,739
I can feel my wallet cry already. This is crazy. I'm still using my 980ti and this makes me feel like it's time to upgrade
 

LCGeek

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Oct 28, 2017
5,857
User Warned: Platform Waring
Besides the Samsung and Sabrnet announcement seems all talk of the last few months is over blown.

Before news console showed up big standards are already in place.

A virtual ram based monster with a 3090 will shit on any console, period. 8 fucking k.
 
gofreak

gofreak

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Oct 26, 2017
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This was pleasing to see. Although it'll be a while before devs can rely on that kind of bandwidth, it might encourage adoption of technologies that can scale up quality to that higher bandwidth (e.g. UE5 Nanite, for starters).

I was watching, but missed if they said where on the GPU the decompression would run? On shader cores? I assume it won't be on RT or tensor cores (?)
 
platocplx

platocplx

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1. New I/O APIs
2. GPU Lossless Decompression
3. Collaboration with MS Direct Storage

things to know is how fast is the decompression.
 
platocplx

platocplx

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LCGeek said:
Besides the Samsung and Sabrnet announcement seems all talk of the last few months is over blown.

Before news console showed up big standards are already in place.

A virtual ram based monster with a 3090 will shit on any console, period. 8 fucking k.
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well if im spending 1500 dollars of course it should lmao. what are you even saying here.
 
theAllseeingEYE

theAllseeingEYE

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Apr 4, 2018
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Really curious how this will work in action. This is the kind of announcement I was looking for. Not sure why I didn't realize they'd include this in GPUs, I assumed it would be on the motherboard, very co stuff.
 
platocplx

platocplx

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theAllseeingEYE said:
Really curious how this will work in action. This is the kind of announcement I was looking for. Not sure why I didn't realize they'd include this in GPUs, I assumed it would be on the motherboard, very co stuff.
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yeah this is good stuff here. glad to see this is a standard across the industry this means SSDs on PC are a must going forward in new builds.
 
Maple

Maple

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Oct 27, 2017
11,722
So what's going on here?

Ampere GPUs help decompress assets on PCIE 4.0 NVME SSDs? This would just be for data that would be stored in VRAM though right?
 
gofreak

gofreak

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Oct 26, 2017
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mentallyinept said:
Basically nVidia made their own SSD read\decompression block like what the PS5 does.
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Did they, or will it be running on shader cores? If it's at all possible, performance wise, I'd hope for something that isn't tied to the newer hardware only. If it's e.g. shader based decompression, it could perhaps be enabled on earlier RTX cards when perf is available.
 
GhostTrick

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Oct 25, 2017
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gofreak said:
Did they, or will it be running on shader cores? If it's at all possible, performance wise, I'd hope for something that isn't tied to the newer hardware only. If it's e.g. shader based decompression, it could perhaps be enabled on earlier RTX cards when perf is available.
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I think they'd run on Tensor Cores.
 
Detail

Detail

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Dec 30, 2018
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So, I am using a Samsung 850 evo 500gb, how is this going to benefit me? Is this going to benefit me for next gen games or will I still need to upgrade my SSD realistically?
 
mentallyinept

mentallyinept

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gofreak said:
Did they, or will it be running on shader cores? If it's at all possible, performance wise, I'd hope for something that isn't tied to the newer hardware only. If it's e.g. shader based decompression, it could perhaps be enabled on earlier cards when perf is available.
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That's a good point. Not sure if this is actual silicon like PS5 or just a new API that can be leveraged by older GPUs.
 
Dictator

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Oct 26, 2017
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gofreak said:
Did they, or will it be running on shader cores? If it's at all possible, performance wise, I'd hope for something that isn't tied to the newer hardware only. If it's e.g. shader based decompression, it could perhaps be enabled on earlier RTX cards when perf is available.
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A good thing to wonder - it is called RTX IO I noticed. RTX is also how the 2XXX series is called.
 

discotheque

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Dec 23, 2019
3,858
So much for that PS5 SSD advantage I guess. All those threads arguing over nothing....

Edit: Stop quoting this :)
 
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gofreak

gofreak

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Oct 26, 2017
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DanteMenethil said:
I don't get it, is it purely for storage to vram how does that also work to fill normal ram?
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I suppose you could read back data from GPU memory, but at a latency cost. Probably better to just let the CPU decompress data bound for system memory, the data being loaded there ought to be smaller anyway (vs textures/geom/graphics assets).
 
HeWhoWalks

HeWhoWalks

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Jan 17, 2018
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Honestly, this was the bigger takeaway for me.

discotheque said:
So much for that PS5 SSD advantage I guess. All those threads arguing over nothing....
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It wasn't over nothing. People debated the facts of the time and made guesses based on those. All this does is add something never considered (which is understandable given how quickly technology changes and evolves).
 
thepenguin55

thepenguin55

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Oct 28, 2017
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I'm a bit of a layman but if I'm understanding this correctly the one real advantage next gen consoles would've had over PC (the SSD tech) is now gone?
 
platocplx

platocplx

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Detail said:
So, I am using a Samsung 850 evo 500gb, how is this going to benefit me? Is this going to benefit me for next gen games or will I still need to upgrade my SSD realistically?
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it should benefit in newer games, not sure how much benefit in older ones, there are APIs. There is prob some benefit with the decompression, but the APIs prob need to be utilized to maximize it i think. but sounds like there should be newer games using it going forward. at least thats my first glance at it. def can be wrong need more info to be sure and see performance differences.
 
zombiejames

zombiejames

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Oct 25, 2017
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So much for the whole "developers will never design games around the PS5 SSD because PC ports will force them to scale down to regular hard drives" nonsense. Bigs ups to Nvidia for pushing this. Ditch your hard drives, people.
 

LCGeek

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Oct 28, 2017
5,857
platocplx said:
well if im spending 1500 dollars of course it should lmao. what are you even saying here.
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The next pc one can build with a 3090 can be insane. This is before next gen ryzen are shown.

Next gen ssd was announced, but say you take the other two components especially 3090 and get 96GB of system ram one could enjoy of lot games with insane IO performance. Hopefully that tech gets used in other apps outside of gaming.

To have threadripper/xeon performance in a gpu for certain tasks is like amazing.
 
mentallyinept

mentallyinept

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HeWhoWalks said:
Honestly, this was the bigger takeaway for me.
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Me as well.

PC GPUs were always going to outclass consoles in terms of FLOPs\VRAM, the killer was the CPU bottleneck of reading all this fuckin' data from the SSD at speed.

Depending on how this is implemented, this closes the gap pretty quickly. We'll see though.
 
Oleander

Oleander

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Oct 25, 2017
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Definitely thinking about my PCIe 3 motherboard looking at this. I'm committed to waiting another generation for a rebuild, but I'm thinking we may see a bottleneck developing over the course of the next couple of years if this takes off.
 
McFly

McFly

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Nov 26, 2017
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WillJoe said:
Eli5?
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No need to copy data into system memory then into GPU memory. You can copy straight from storage to GPU memory. Removes IO as bottleneck and reduces CPU utilization for moving large amount of data very very fast. In short the SSD will be utilized to its full potential just like in next gen consoles.
 
xem

xem

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Oct 31, 2017
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thepenguin55 said:
I'm a bit of a layman but if I'm understanding this correctly the one real advantage next gen consoles would've had over PC (the SSD tech) is now gone?
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its going to vary by situation. Like i have an older pc so i would need to buy new board/ram/proccessor/gpu to even come to a level of ps5/series x, much less surpass it. comparisons always have to be done based on cost imo, otherwise whats the point if money is no measure in the equation then its not worth discussing because you can always buy a more expensive more powerful thing
 
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