Microsoft has released its public preview of DirectStorage 1.4, which adds Zstandard for faster game load times & Asset Streaming.
Windows PCs Will Now Be Able To Deliver Faster Game Load Times & Asset Streaming With DirectStorage 1.4
Microsoft today released its DirectStorage 1.4 API, which adds a brand new feature called Zstandard or Zstd. This is a new compression algorithm that is used as an option for game assets on the Windows operating system. According to Microsoft, the new feature provides an open standard that helps improve compression ratios, provides faster load times, and also delivers smoother asset streaming in games.
Microsoft is co-engineering the DirectStorage 1.4 Zstandard compression with all major GPU hardware vendors, including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA & Qualcomm. Following is what each hardware vendor has to say about DirectStorage 1.4:
AMD: “Aligning the industry on an open compression standard builds a foundation for future game titles to deliver immersive experiences with even larger worlds than realistically possible today. We plan to make optimizations for AMD GPUs available in a public driver during the second half of 2026 and look forward to seeing how developers use these investments to enhance the player experience.” – Daniel Staheli, CVP Software Development, AMD
Intel: “We’re co-engineering with Microsoft to tune Zstandard decompression through DirectStorage across our GPU architectures. We look forward to sharing our performance improvements in the months ahead.” – Lisa Pearce, Corporate Vice President, Software Group, Intel
NVIDIA: “NVIDIA is excited to bring Zstd support to game developers, with decompression optimizations tailored for NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs arriving in the second half of this year.” – Patrick Neill, Distinguished Engineer, NVIDIA
Qualcomm: “Before the end of the year, we’re excited to bring tuned driver updates that reflect our investments in Zstd decompression on our platforms. We look forward to these investments ensuring reliable, high performance asset streaming across Windows games.” – Nagendra Kumar, Senior Director of Engineering, Qualcomm
DirectStorage and Zstd
DirectStorage 1.4 brings Zstd codec support to the runtime. Zstd is a popular and open compression standard that meets our key criteria for the next great compression codec for game development.
We evaluated codecs across the following key criteria: compression ratio and decompression performance, hardware and software availability, and existing adoption. Zstd stands out by delivering competitive compression ratios and decompression performance, broad availability on hardware and software across operating systems, and widespread adoption in OS, cloud, and web scenarios.
In this release, Zstd is added to our multi-tier decompression framework with support for CPU and GPU decompression. This lets developers pick the best execution option for their workload today, while our GPU partners work towards future hardware-specific optimizations for Zstd.
We’re also open-sourcing Microsoft’s Zstd GPU decompression compute shader on the DirectStorage GitHub as an early, working baseline that all GPU implementations can reference. The shader is in development and is initially optimized for content chunked to 256KB or smaller, consistent with modern game packaging patterns for streaming workloads. We plan to expand capabilities and continue improving the performance of the shader over the coming months as these compression investments scale across the PC ecosystem.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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