DirectStorage streaming my weapon skins in CS2 — is it actually helping or just making textures pop?

[Zack Watson]

I’ve been running a 120 Hz 1080p rig for competitive shooters and been hitting occasional texture pop-ins when running into new maps, even though my specs are fine on paper. My setup is a 3070, Gen4 NVMe (900 GB/s), 32GB RAM. I read that newer engines use DirectStorage with GPU decompression to stream textures frame by frame, so I figured upgrading my SSD would fix the popping, but it’s still there sometimes.

I don’t really get what’s actually bottlenecking here. Is the issue my PCIe link bandwidth, the decompression speed, or something else? What’s the deal with DirectStorage vs how older games loaded textures, and what actually determines whether texture streaming stays smooth in a fast-paced FPS? Any real-world tuning or hardware advice would be a lifesaver.

"Game Boy Advance SP (IPS V5 Modded) + Miyoo Mini Plus collector."

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