Nvidia finally release the RTX IO, which had first announced back in 2020. The GPU decompression technology was first unveiled alongside the RTX 3000 series of GPUs and is now making its way to its cards. The company claims that this technology can help deliver a smoother gaming experience, by reducing stuttering issues. So let’s see how this process works.
Nvidia RTX IO: What is it all about?
Nvidia rolled out the RTX IO along with the release of Portal: Prelude RTX. With this technology, your PC can offload the workload from your CPU cores to your GPU when gaming. This basically helps improve performance stability since GPUs are better equipped to handle such tasks. The technology was also built to deal with the changing process of how your PC’s hardware access game data. Typically, the assets of a game are sent from the hard drive to the CPU after being decompressed through system memory, finally makings its way to the GPU.
The multiple steps in this process are what lead to stuttering in games since the size of video games and their assets have grown in recent years. A bottleneck is created between the CPU and the RAM, which makes the gaming experience choppy every so often. This issue has grown more apparent as faster NVMe SSDs have become more common in gaming rigs.
This is where the RTX IO comes in, as it increases the I/O bandwidth by delivering the compressed data directly to the GPU. This creates what Nvidia refers to as a ‘minimal staging’ in the system memory. Furthermore, Team Green’s GPU decompresses the data by using the GDeflate open compression standard. Thanks to this, the CPU is free to deal with other processes.
To highlight this, Nvidia’s announcement showcased the faster texture load times and reduced disk space from the RTX IO. This technology can offer up to 5 times faster texture load times and can even lower disk space by 44 percent in Portal: Prelude RTX. WccfTech reached out to Nvidia to confirm if this technology can reduce stuttering in games. The company responded stating “RTX IO can be an aiding technology to improve stuttering by reducing the dependence on the CPU in loading textures and geometries and freeing it up to work on other tasks.”
Keep in mind that these figures were tested with the remodeled version of an old Portal RTX remaster. So it isn’t exactly the best benchmark to rely on. Although, there are new titles on the way like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC, which will feature DirectStorage 1.2 with the GPU-based compression technology that uses RTX IO. So we can expect better benchmarks soon.
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