I did some test on my deck when I first got it seeing the difference in load times when a game was installed on its m.2 SSD vs a Micro SD card and the difference was there but pretty negligible. a long load time that took 16 seconds on SSD took 18 on Micro SD. It isn’t something I’d personally notice unless I was timing it.
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game. I use my SD card for almost all of my games on my steam deck none of them have any problems loading none of them load slowly.
Games are very good about preloading assets before they’re needed
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game.
Microsoft is at least partly responsibile for this. Modern Windows loves to dominate your hard drive with background tasks that you didn’t ask for, to the point of leaving foreground tasks starved for I/O.
I find Linux to be superior in this area, and I often run modern games from a slow mechanical hard drive with no trouble at all. It’s unsurprising that your Steam Deck does just fine with an SD card.
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game.
For real, I only talk by experience and with old hardware, but my hacked Switch V1 runs everything, even its OS purely from the SD and I feel it runs just the same as with stock storage.
I have tried the same on my hacked switch v1. I was running Overcooked 2 from the sd card and got a little frustrated with the load times so I tries moving in to internal storage. Noticed no improvement in load speed at all. But I don’t know the speed of my SD card or the speed of the switch, it might as well be the same.
Not manufacturers, experience. I remember gaming on HDDs, it was bad. SSDs were a breath of fresh air. The SD cards I own are so much worse than the HDDs that I own, so I’m very skeptical that they are fast enough.
Do you mind sharing the games your playing? And the texture resolution settings?
You remember an era before streaming assets and preloading optimization lol. Also HDD are terrible at random IO amd transactional latency. Sequential read isn’t the issue never was it was random IO and seek latency. You had to wait for the HDD to even get to the data in the first place to even start reading it. much like an SSD, SD cards don’t suffer from that transactional latency.
Anyway the “larger” games I’ve played is probably cyberpunk, DRG, and i guess overwatch? I’m not exactly a huge AAA person I like a lot of indie titles. Vein is probably the most recent game on my list since its early access. A lot of historical games would be factorio, satisfactory, Dyson Sphere program, rimworld, valheim, endless dungeon, Risk of rain 2, things like that.
Settings are usually whatever max i can maintain near 60 with. First sacrifice is always shadows and extra lighting before textures
MicroSD cards are crazy slow compared to all other storage, this doesnt seem like a good idea
I did some test on my deck when I first got it seeing the difference in load times when a game was installed on its m.2 SSD vs a Micro SD card and the difference was there but pretty negligible. a long load time that took 16 seconds on SSD took 18 on Micro SD. It isn’t something I’d personally notice unless I was timing it.
Manufacturers have wildly oversold you on how much speed you need to run a game. I use my SD card for almost all of my games on my steam deck none of them have any problems loading none of them load slowly.
Games are very good about preloading assets before they’re needed
Microsoft is at least partly responsibile for this. Modern Windows loves to dominate your hard drive with background tasks that you didn’t ask for, to the point of leaving foreground tasks starved for I/O.
I find Linux to be superior in this area, and I often run modern games from a slow mechanical hard drive with no trouble at all. It’s unsurprising that your Steam Deck does just fine with an SD card.
For real, I only talk by experience and with old hardware, but my hacked Switch V1 runs everything, even its OS purely from the SD and I feel it runs just the same as with stock storage.
I have tried the same on my hacked switch v1. I was running Overcooked 2 from the sd card and got a little frustrated with the load times so I tries moving in to internal storage. Noticed no improvement in load speed at all. But I don’t know the speed of my SD card or the speed of the switch, it might as well be the same.
Not manufacturers, experience. I remember gaming on HDDs, it was bad. SSDs were a breath of fresh air. The SD cards I own are so much worse than the HDDs that I own, so I’m very skeptical that they are fast enough.
Do you mind sharing the games your playing? And the texture resolution settings?
You remember an era before streaming assets and preloading optimization lol. Also HDD are terrible at random IO amd transactional latency. Sequential read isn’t the issue never was it was random IO and seek latency. You had to wait for the HDD to even get to the data in the first place to even start reading it. much like an SSD, SD cards don’t suffer from that transactional latency.
Anyway the “larger” games I’ve played is probably cyberpunk, DRG, and i guess overwatch? I’m not exactly a huge AAA person I like a lot of indie titles. Vein is probably the most recent game on my list since its early access. A lot of historical games would be factorio, satisfactory, Dyson Sphere program, rimworld, valheim, endless dungeon, Risk of rain 2, things like that.
Settings are usually whatever max i can maintain near 60 with. First sacrifice is always shadows and extra lighting before textures
It’ll be fine for most games you’d want to run on lower power stuff like the Frame/Deck.
UHS II micro SD cards operate at 312MB/s
That’s pretty good… It’s like double a typical HDD read speed
Read or write? I can hit the write sticker speed on mine, but read is terrible.
If read is terrible it might be due to having atime writes turned on, or just a bad card. Usually read is better than write. What filesystem?