Microsoft details how Xbox Series X will load 4.8GB/s from memory ~ USA Latest Games

Explode! [credit: Microsoft ]

The bulk of the speed increase, as Microsoft has said before, comes from the system's use of NVMe SSD memory, rather than the much slower-spinning hard drives of past consoles. That gives the system "2.4 GB/s of raw I/O throughput," Microsoft says, though we've noted previously it will also likely make expanding that memory past the built-in 1TB default more expensive.

To extend that speed even further, Microsoft says it's expanding on the "industry standard LZ decompressor" with "a brand new, proprietary algorithm specifically designed for texture data named BCPack." This hardware-accelerated texture-unpacking algorithm can be run in parallel with the standard LZ decompressor, Microsoft says, increasing the functional throughput of the I/O bus without using up precious CPU core cycles. In fact, without hardware acceleration, Microsoft says similar software-exclusive decompression methods "would require more than four Zen 2 CPU cores" to achieve the same results.

Microsoft also went into a bit more detail on its previously announced DirectStorage API. That new expansion of the DirectX pipeline offers developers "fine grain control of their I/O operations" on the Series X, "empowering them to establish multiple I/O queues, prioritization and minimizing I/O latency," Microsoft says. That should help with situations where developers need specific data to show up from memory right when they need it, ahead of other data that used to be loaded at the same time.

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