Windows 11 offers significant benefits to gamers, including Auto HDR, DirectStorage, and improved integration with Xbox Game Pass. DirectStorage, which reduces SSD load times for games, is arguably the most important feature of the three.

However, if you are on the fence about upgrading to Windows 11 to allow your games to take full advantage of DirectStorage, you may want to hold off. This feature has been officially introduced in Windows 10 and should be available as soon as developers start implementing it.

The information comes from the Microsoft DirectX Developer Blog, where Hassan Uraizee, a program manager at Microsoft, explained the details of the DirectStorage Developer Preview. acknowledged that DirectStorage could improve games on Windows 11, and also shared some new information: DirectStorage is available on Windows 10, at least if you use version 1909. (Windows 10, version 1909 is already two years old. If you keep your computer as up-to-date as possible, you should be able to take advantage of the new technology.)

Furthermore, there is no definite release date for DirectStorage in Windows 10 games yet; according to Uraizee, in theory, gamers can start using it as soon as developers start implementing the feature. DirectStorage is still in the preview stage, so interested parties should contact Microsoft's storage team to share details of the project. In other words, it depends on how quickly developers can integrate this new technology and how quickly Microsoft can approve it.

The rest of Uraizee's post is fairly technical, discussing how DirectStorage will take advantage of GPU decompression and how DirectX 12 will handle I/O requests. In short, DirectStorage can help make GPUs more efficient in both loading and managing in-game assets.

However, there is one interesting tidbit at the end of the post.

"In fact, this great compatibility extends to a variety of different hardware configurations," Uraizee writes.

This does not necessarily mean that DirectStorage will make games on HDDs faster. However, it does mean that the implementation of DirectStorage technology will not adversely affect PCs with lower performance, which is good news for gamers who were concerned that the Windows 11 upgrade would hamper older systems.

Still, even if DirectStorage is available for Windows 10, there may still be gaming-related reasons to upgrade to Windows 11; Auto HDR still appears to be Windows 11-only, at least for now. Uraizee also noted that "Windows 11 will benefit even more from the new storage stack optimizations."

We will have to wait for developers to implement them and do comparison tests on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 to see how practical the effects of these technologies will be. In the meantime, if you haven't yet upgraded your gaming PC to an SSD, now would be a good time to do so.