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There is a new interest in GPU-side general-purpose decompression due to Microsoft pushing DirectStorage.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-1-1-com...

To digress and talk about DirectStorage, reading their documentation and announcements still leaves me with an unanswered question. Maybe someone knows the answer.

Does DirectStorage only work for games, or can one use it for compute workloads?

Context: I've been learning some basic GPU programming (via rust-gpu though, not CUDA), and one of the things that sound easy to implement are offloading compute kernels to the GPU (e.g. arrow-rs).

Being able to load datasets via DirectStorage could be great, but as I'm still really learning the basics, I can't figure out whether I could leverage this for my work/learning.

You can use it for any workload that can use D3D12 buffers or textures as input. All the API does for you is transfer data from disk to ID3D12Resource object. After that it is up to you to do whatever you want - use it for fragment shader or compute shader input, etc.. If you use other api's like cuda or vulkan, then you'll need to use interop to create their resources using D3D12 backed resource (or do a copy, whatever is possible there).

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