Anyone running I/O heavy games on Windows ReFS? :: Hardware and Operating Systems

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Adam Beckett 6 Sep, 2024 @ 7:05pm

Anyone running I/O heavy games on Windows ReFS?

Good luck, googlebinging this topic in the search engines.

Windows ReFS = 'Resilient File System' is meant to be the replacement for NTFS. It is like Microsoft's version of something like BTRFS.

ReFS did not make it to the consumer Windows version ... until very recently. If you are on Win11, you might have seen the term 'Dev Drive' inside your secpol.msc.

Windows 11 allows single users to create a 'Developer Drive' (either partition or VHD) and those are formatted in ReFS.

Why do you want to use ReFS?

Aside from its server-oriented journaling features, it also improves performance with 'big data' I/O shuffling = ideal for 'big games' with 'big files'?

These days, all of the AAA titles are heavily dependent on 'data streaming' = reading from big files, pushing data into memory. Bandwidth is key - CPU cache, GPU lanes ... all matters.

To see if ReFS has an impact (and how much) compared to NTFS, one would have to have a 'perfect setup', so read/write speeds could be measured, without being affected by other hardware (or driver) bottlenecks. Currently, it is hard to tell, but worth trying out?

Anyone had experience with it ... or maybe, even know an article of somebody testing games and game performance in a ReFS vs NTFS rap battle?

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Showing 1-9 of 9 comments

Omega 6 Sep, 2024 @ 7:15pm

Copy-on-write would be the primary thing impacting performance of ReFS. But this, as the name suggests, only affects writes, not reads.

There are very few benchmarks available online. Overal it seems like reads are about the same or slightly slower, writes are a lot slower as expected.

But there is much more to a filesystem than just raw read and write performance. ReFS is significantly more resiliant to corruption than NTFS.

This needs more testing, this FS seems to have all kinds of fancy features we can play with.

Data dedup is a bug feature also, it can save storage space in some scenarios.

Last edited by Omega; 6 Sep, 2024 @ 7:20pm

h_emlock 29 Dec, 2024 @ 10:11pm

I'm also curious about the possible benefits of installing game files to a dev drive! Have you figured out anything new on this?

Adam Beckett 29 Dec, 2024 @ 11:04pm

Hi there.

Nothing, that I myself can report on.

Tested it on a Ryzen true 16-core, doing some heavy Terabyte robocopy file shovelling. Difference is probably in the sub-ms area?

This seems to be a very 'academic', if not obscure subject, unless you are working in Data Centers at Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. or are joining the "Storage Networking Industry Association" https://www.snia.org/

My guess would be: does not matter in a 'game' environment. Dev or player.

In the end - as with all gamedev things - (r/w) cache is king? As is more and/or faster lanes & bandwidth (m2, pcie5, pcie6 ...)?

In itself, this is quite an interesting topic: how to ever improve performance AND reliability, but without the cost of 'data failure'. Contradictory. Doing RAID type of things ... on a single drive, via drivers and chip controllers.

Reminds me of the decades old UNIX zfs vs xfs discussions, long before btrfs was even an idea. Once again, Microsoft trying to copy UNIX tech and stay relevant. Not a bad idea, though. Slow to adopt, due to their equally 'resilient' customer base?

r.linder 29 Dec, 2024 @ 11:06pm

Yeah, as Omega said, it's not about the performance, it's about resilience which is why it's named ReFS. Considering that NTFS partitions are pretty freaking prone to corruption and how easily Windows gets corrupted, they need all of the help they can get to solve that.

PopinFRESH 30 Dec, 2024 @ 4:02am

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:
...
Windows ReFS = 'Resilient File System' is meant to be the replacement for NTFS. It is like Microsoft's version of something like BTRFS. ...

You're starting out with a flawed premise. ReFS is meant to expand the feature set for enterprise and server storage needs, not as a wholesale replacement for NTFS as a general-purpose filesystem. It was initially built from some portions of the NTFS code when it shipped as a trial feature on Windows Server 2012, by the time it was added to Windows Server 2016 it was pretty much a wholly different codebase.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview

While long-term they hope to be able to expand its feature set to service the features of NTFS; that hasn't been the immediate intention (for the past decade of its development). It isn't a bootable filesystem currently, doesn't support compression or encryption, doesn't support extended file attributes or disk quotas; so it isn't being targeted at the consumer general purpose systems.

Back in March for the Windows Server Summit they did discuss adding boot support so ReFS could be used as a bootable volume for their new "Confidential VMs" as part of Windows Server 2025. However, I still don't see it replacing NTFS as the default filesystem for general purpose use on consumer Windows any time soon. Most of the focus is on supporting features to expand the functionality for enterprise features and virtualization such as Azure VMs, Azure local, Hyper-V, etc.