It was presented, it was well received, desired and after that the most absolute silence apart from light annual stitches. Microsoft DirectStorage as an API for gaming is a leap that gamers and developers need to be able to take the next step in gaming but for some reason it keeps slowing down and the response to that may be quite specific: AMD, NVIDIA and Intel want their own version. For this reason, those of Lisa Su have been working for many months in what they called SAS oh Smart Access Storageof which we now have news.
It’s not that sensitive information about the API in question has leaked, what’s more, it’s the first news on this subject, since everything was betting on the fact that Microsoft has finished implementing it as it is , as if it were DirectX , but it looks like the big three might have different plans.
AMD SAS (Smart Access Storage), an adapted version?
Well that’s what’s being said, mostly because as we mentioned those in Redmond haven’t finished launching their API and AMD may have devised their own way to get all the benefits of this technology by making it his own for his material.
They design CPUs and GPUs after all, so a custom implementation of Microsoft’s technology wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
The speculation running behind the scenes at the moment is that Microsoft could have designed the API as such and handed it over with some interests for further development to AMD, NVIDIA and Intelso that everyone can adapt it to their equipment.
What has been confirmed and is a bigger surprise is that the first equipment that will inc orporate it will be the CORSAIR Voyager, a laptop that will be the brand’s first attempt to enter this sector and that it will be planned for some time this month.
Presentation at Computex 2022?
We already know that Lisa Su will participate in this event and that she will make several presentations, among which this technology will surely be AMD Smart Access Storage or SASas the red team seems to like to call it.
What is this technology going to do to tell us that it can change the course of the game? Basically, it improves the interconnection, access time, latency and with it loading games from the SSD or HDD to RAM and GPU, offloading work the CPU was now doing.
The way it works AMD SAS it is similar in theory and concept to DirectStorage, as it would leave out the CPU to focus on connecting the storage with the graphics card and its GPU through a PCIe network card. This technology is similar to the implementation of NVIDIA with RTX IOwhere, as seen in the bottom slide, it seeks a virtually identical end to AMD SAS.
In other words, the graphic design can directly access the SSD or HDD if it is necessary to pass through the processor, where it involves a reduction in the access time and with the total latency of the system for transporting texturas or local files that the motor requires Game.
Therefore, AMD SAS could be a software layer that simulates the operation of DirectStorage or optimizes it for the manufacturer’s hardware, as we have seen with other technologies such as Adaptive Sync vs FreeSync.
