Microsoft released a major up date to DirectStorage, the API that promises to reduce game loading times. The new DirectStorage 1.2 adds the ability to speed up game loading for mechanical hard drives, a feature game developers requested Microsoft for. DirectStorage brings much of the storage sub-system secret sauce of consoles over to PC, and consoles have held on to mechanical HDDs as game storage devices longer than mainstream gaming PCs.

HDDs require buffered reads to compensate for the longer seek times, whereas DirectStorage traditionally accesses files in unbuffered mode, which disqualified HDDs for DirectStorage. With this update, HDDs can take advantage of DirectStorage, wherein game data stored on them are directly accessed by GPUs, and compressed game assets are decompressed on the fly through the compute-shader acceleration capabilities of modern GPUs.