GPUs have lots of cores and do massively parallel tasks like decompression better than CPUs, so this approach saves a lot of time. Secondly, we want to ensure that data is moved from storage to the GPU before it's decompressed. First, we want to acces data in parallel to massively reduce load times compared to the old Windows I/O standard.

Happily, the advent of rapid, low-latency flash storage in SSDs mean that we don't need to read data in a sequential way to minimise seek times - we can create a new standard.

That means assets need to be decompressed by the CPU before they can be used on the GPU, and the extra time and CPU burden this imposes means that the traditional approach starts to break down.

This technique worked well enough with relatively small game assets being loaded from HDDs, but with games now being hundreds of gigabytes in size with extremely detailed assets, all of this data needs to be compressed to make good use of the available storage space and bandwidth. Here's the full Alex Battaglia video presentation on RTX IO in Portal: Prelude RTX. This was quite a latency-heavy, serial approach as the disk had to physically spin up the spindle, locate the data, then load the data block by block in a way that minimises the amount of seeking necessary. Historically, loading involved game data like textures or models being transferred from a hard drive to system memory and then on to the GPU under the control of the CPU. Its purpose is to accelerate game loading and asset streaming on the PC platform, and its inclusion here gives us a good excuse to see how the technology works.

This is essentially an Nvidia-branded version of Direct Storage 1.2, which is also included in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart which launches on PC later this month. More interestingly though, Prelude is also the first game to support RTX IO, a GPU-accelerated decompression scheme running under Vulkan. It is truly spectacular - and hopefully one of many path-traced remasters to come in the future as the RTX Remix modding tools approach release. Portal: Prelude RTX is an impressive showcase of Nvidia's RTX Remix technology, which takes what was once a Source mod for Portal and gives it visual features and technology that rival and even surpass high-end triple AAA releases.

Company of heroes 2 ai mod