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With just a microSD card, you’ll be able to easily bring your games across the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame. (www.theverge.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] -5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

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?

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  • [–] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Maybe you have better SD cards, but mine are just terrible (150MB/s on the label, but real world reads are 20MB/s, random IO also seems trash but I dont have any numbers for that), so I have a tough time believing that their sufficient, even with streaming IO. Next time I get a chance I'll install a game on it and give it a whirl, but I'm pretty pessimistic.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Keep in mind that on Windows this is pretty much guaranteed to fail because Windows is trash at dealing with IO. A hilarious fact if you install Windows on a virtual machine running under a Linux host it will get better IO benchmarks than if you were to install Windows on that machine bare metal.

    It's also constantly thrashing the system with a bunch of b******* background IO so a big part of why this can work is that steamos is using Linux lol

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Well, you are correct, they are more than adequate. I updated my original comment with my findings, but just wanted to say thanks for informing me. I'll still keep using SSDs personally, because I have lost a few SD cards to corruption over the years, but I can see the appeal of moving between systems easily.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    I also run a lot of games off an SD card in my deck. Dragon age veilguard is probably the most demanding I've played off an SD card it didn't have issues.

    I know whenever I purchase an SD card for the deck or something demanding I do a decent bit of research. There are a bunch of different terms/specs on SD cards that impact performance, more than just 150 MB/s. Perhaps the SD card you have isn't the best for gaming, or maybe it's a dud card or a crappy manufacturer.

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