Forspoken dev says one-second game loads are now a tentative reality on PC

The developer of the tech showcase game Forspoken claims that DirectStorage will bring a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds to PC games.

Teppei Ono, Luminous Production's technical director, says that the Square Enix title will load some scenes in one second flat if you have a Windows 11 PC with a 5,000MB/s read speed.

He didn't show us any scenes load in that amount of time, instead he showed us examples of Forspoken taking 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds, and 2.2 seconds.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

You might be wondering if it's as fast as games run without DirectStorage, but Ono admits it's not yet: while you'll definitely see a huge speed boost from an SSD over the magnetic spinning platters of a hard drive.

HDDs are not delivering the anticipated result due to hardware performance limitations, so if you've been hoping that DirectStorage will bring enhanced performance with regular spinning hard drives, the answer is not yet.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

The data transfer speeds of DirectStorage are clearly faster for SSDs, and they could improve it in the future if they figure out otherCPU bottlenecks.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

He says that most PC games don't take as much advantage of the speed of NVMe as Forspoken does. In my experience, the fastest load times I have seen are on Final Fantasy VII ReMake Intergrade on a PS5 which can take just 10 seconds from the time you leave the home screen to the time you can move your character. It is not clear if Forspoken is counting from the app's launch or not.

Ono says they are using other techniques to speed up load times, such as loading the game in advance while you are on the title screen.

The team says it took less than a week to integrate into the game and support temporal upscaling for higher effective resolutions.