NVIDIA RTX IO launches for faster game texture loading times with Portal Prelude RTX

Today, NVIDIA announced its latest ray tracing-supported game, Portal Prelude RTX. The mod, based on Valve's classic first-person puzzle game, not only supports ray-tracing effects and DLSS 3 for NVIDIA's graphics card, but it is also the first game to use an all-new tech from the company, NVIDIA RTX IO.

This new technology is trying to solve a problem that has been an issue for many PC gamers over the years. Even if they have fast GPUs and CPUs inside their rigs, sometimes it takes more than a few seconds for high-end textures to show up on objects and characters in games. AMD already has its own version of this, also based on Microsoft's DirectStorage, called "SmartAccess Storage".

NVIDIA decided to try to help with this situation. In a blog post today, it stated:

Enter NVIDIA RTX IO, enabling fast GPU-based loading and game asset decompression, massively accelerating IO performance compared to hard drives and traditional storage APIs. NVIDIA RTX IO leverages GPU decompression for smaller data packages, enabling faster texture load times and lower CPU utilization, and allows developers to create a new generation of games with massive highly detailed worlds.

You can see how this works in the brief video above. Using RTX IO, loading times for the textures in Portal: Prelude RTX are over three times as fast compared to its use with this option turned off.

In addition to faster texture loading times, RTX IO also enables those same textures to use up to 44 percent less storage. NVIDIA stated that this can allow games with "32 GB of 4K textures loaded with lossless detail, while only taking up 18 GB of storage space."

In a more technical post on RTX IO, the company says that the new tech is supported by Microsoft's DirectX through its DirectStorage feature, along with Vulkan via extensions.

In addition to Portal: Prelude RTX, the new RTX IO tech will be used in the upcoming PC version of Insomniac and Sony's PS5 game Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which will launch on July 26.

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