This feature is reportedly killing PC performance in Spider-Man 2

3 hours ago 3

Miles and Peter standing next to each other staring at the camera. Peter is in the Venom suit.

Spider-Man 2 is officially out on PC, and according to some early testing, the game has a bit of a problem with Microsoft’s DirectStorage. This feature enables GPU decompression in Spider-Man 2, and some users claim deleting the files associated with DirectStorage will actually improve your performance.

Sebastian Castellanos shared some benchmarks with DirectStorage on and off in the game on X, which you can see below. There’s only a minor change in performance with DirectStorage disabled, but Castellanos is already running at a very high frame rate. It doesn’t look like much to write home about.

Spent some time benchmarking/tweaking Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC. On my system (14700K+32 GB DDR5+RTX 4090), I could gain a decent amount of performance by overclocking the GPU, turning on Manual Re-BAR and deleting the DirectStorage DLL files. Game is a crash fest though. pic.twitter.com/O4Uia2Dozj

— Sebastian Castellanos (@Sebasti66855537) February 2, 2025

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However, YouTube channel Compusemble followed up with its own testing, finding a 10% increase in performance with DirectStorage disabled when using the RTX 4090 at 4K. The performance gains were smaller at lower resolutions, with a 6% improvement at 1440p and only a 3% improvement at 1080p.

Spider Man 2 - DirectStorage with GPU Decompression On vs Off Comparison

It makes sense that DirectStorage would contribute to some performance loss. A loss of 10% at 4K is extreme, but the feature enables GPU decompression in Spider-Man 2. This allows your GPU to decompress the game’s assets instead of your CPU, which can improve performance when your CPU isn’t up to snuff. If you’re already pushing your GPU hard, however, like when running a demanding AAA game at 4K, some of your GPU’s resources are allocated to DirectStorage instead of rendering the game, lowering performance.

Both Compusemble and Castellanos were testing with high-end CPUs — an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Intel Core i7-14700K, respectively — and I suspect the performance dynamic would change significantly if testing with a weaker CPU. You can see a bit of that with Compusemble’s testing, where the performance gain decreases down at 1080p when there’s more strain put on the CPU.

You can’t disable DirectStorage within Spider-Man 2. If you want to turn the feature off, you’ll need to go into the game’s installation folder and delete two files — dstorage.dll and dstoragecore.dll. The game should work just fine without these files, but if it doesn’t, you’ll either need to verify the game’s files through Steam or do a fresh install. You can also back up the .dll files elsewhere and add them back in the folder should you run into any issues.

Spider-Man 2 has only been out on PC for a few days, but it’s already seen two hotfixes, one of which was released today. Neither of the fixes mention DirectStorage specifically, but the latest points toward “stability improvements” across the game.

Jacob Roach

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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