If you play the recently released 3D platformer Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on an Nvidia Geforce graphics card, you may have significantly fewer frames per second than would actually be possible. If Direct Storage is activated, the frame rate drops significantly on Nvidia graphics cards. AMD is not affected by this, for Intel this is currently still unclear.
Computerbase has one for the game technique test published by noticing that the game sometimes ran much better on AMD graphics cards than on Nvidia GPUs. Above all, the so-called frame pacing, i.e. the time interval between the individual images, was much more even on the AMD cards, which ensures a smoother gaming experience.
This is most likely due to direct storage, because a somewhat cumbersome deactivation of the API immediately provides more fps. To do this, you need the two files dstorage.dll and dstoragecore.dll in the register /Steam/Steamapps/common/Rachet & Clank – Rift Apart to be deleted. After that the problem no longer exists.
The advantages of direct storage are also missing
The colleagues also noticed that the performance of the game scales with the speed of the SSD on Nvidia graphics cards. A Sata SSD should therefore cause more stuttering than a faster NVMe SSD. Deleting the Direct Storage files and thus not using the API also helps at this point.
The developers of the title will probably have to work on the implementation of Direct Storage again. In addition to the error mentioned, there was also no advantage in terms of loading times, which is actually the point of the technology. By unpacking the game data on the graphics card and loading textures directly into the graphics memory, the slower detour via the CPU should be avoided.