There's low level and high level access and game-makers can choose whichever flavour they want - but it's the new I/O API that allows developers to tap into the extreme speed of the new hardware. The concept of filenames and paths is gone in favour of an ID-based system which tells the system exactly where to find the data they need as quickly as possible. Developers simply need to specify the ID, the start location and end location and a few milliseconds later, the data is delivered. Two command lists are sent to the hardware - one with the list of IDs, the other centring on memory allocation and deallocation - i.e. making sure that the memory is freed up for the new data.