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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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[–] 56 points 9 months ago

It's so nice that SOMEONE is trying to make good use of great technology and isn't actively trying to engineer microSD cards out of existence.

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    [–] 44 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    This gives me tremendous hope for more x86 game emulation on Android devices, because Valve have been throwing resources behind the development of FEX for emulation on ARM for the Frame.

    I am absolutely convinced that my existing phone and retro gaming handheld have enough horsepower for 3D games from 6 years ago once this compatibility layers are built out a bit.

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

    6 years ago might be a bit ambitious, unless you are thinking of certain games that were more AA or Indie.

    But yeah, having this in the ecosystem will be great in the long term, no question.

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

    Games from 2019 are certainly playable on relatively modern flagship phones. About the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is where it seems to me where Gamehub and Winlator start being viable for PS4 era AAA PC games. 8 Elite, 8 Elite Gen 5, Dimensity 9x00 and chips are held back by graphics drivers. Exynos with the AMD GPUs seem held back by thermals. Pixels Tensors, thermals and graphics drivers. All held back by immaturity of box64 and FEX and overall integration of those and other open source tools into a single streamlined application

    You can keep an eye on reports from peoples experience here

    https://www.emuready.com/listings?systemIds=%5B%221ed45a96-5845-4ae4-aa70-86cdb1ee1333%22%5D

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    Thanks. I have the lite app and I've submitted a few compatibility reports of my own, along the way.

    I really, REALLY want to get Ghostwire Tokyo working at a thing near 30fps so that I can ditch my Steam Deck and travel with just my Ayn Thor, and that's why I'm watching the evolution of the Frame, and of this space, with baited breath.

    It's still worthwhile to stream from a more powerful computer over the Internet when service is available.

    Edit: I'll add that I have been shocked at how great a game can run on an Ayn Thor,, like BioShock infinite and Batman Arkham City are both happy to hit 60fps at or above 720p. A year from now it's plausible my 2019 games could play nice!

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    My main way to play is streaming my PC to a phone over the local network. My phone's OLED display is the nicest display I have. Gamehub, eventually I'll be playing the Batman Arkham games and the old Yakuza games when on a long flight or train ride. I've seen online people have great success with all the devil may cry PC ports

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I literally just downloaded the oh Yakuza game last night to test this morning! Are you me?!? 👋🏻🤣

    Seriously, I would much rather talk excitedly about all the crazy ways we get this s*** to work, and tear down people in our circles.

    I'm realizing this cold November morning, that I need Lemmy to be what Reddit was 15 years ago and 10 years ago. Because I just spent the last hour responding to posts in /r/sbcgaming and /r/steam asking "why tf are we being so mean to each other?"

    When we are essentially in the same teams.

    Anyhow, slightly more on point, I was absolutely flabbergasted last week, to discover that I could run 'Ghostwire: Tokyo' on my PC at home --> 'Moonlight' stream it over 'Tailscale' --> play it on an 'Ayn Thor' Android handheld 450 Miles away --> 'Chromecast' it to the 8 years old 'Nvidia Shield TV' I set up in my folks living room, and play on their tv with low enough latency to actually progress my story, and the only configuration required was putting my device on the same network as the TV set top box.

    This is the future I was always trying to cobble together, and honestly it feels like it would not have been possible without steam making so many of the underlying software services and links.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    When I learned you could run the old Yakuza games on a Steam Deck setting it the lowest power setting, I got excited for Android phones because I saw people running the Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk. Anything that played under like 8w on a Deck, certainly that could work on a recent flagship Android phone if you could get Cyberpunk running on those

    I plan on trying remote network gaming through tailscale at some point. I don't even care to play outside the home like that. I just want to see it work

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Aside, I just wanted to say that this was really pleasant. I've spent way too much time in the last week or so trying to share relatable and geeky experiences with these technologies, in various subreddits that really just feel like flame wars.

    So this was a breath of fresh air

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    I use it almost daily, and it works great for anything but twitchy,online Bro Shooters. Apollo/Artemis over Tailscale runs better than Steam Remote Play // Steam Link, and they handle client resolution switching for you.

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    • [–] 18 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Such a delight to see people really praising Valve for doing such and obvious yet revolutionary tech development and at the same time in next post people be shitting on Gabe for buying a multi-million research vessel cause he's a fucking billionaire and there is no good billionaires.

    Fun times to live!

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    [–] 10 points 9 months ago

    It's such an obvious and simple thing but it really feels revolutionary and high-tech.

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    [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

    MicroSD cards are crazy slow compared to all other storage, this doesnt seem like a good idea

    I had a chance to test Watch Dogs Legion on my fastest SD card (Samsung, v30, 170MB/s read, 130MB/s write) and it was perfectly playable, even cranked to ultra. So I take back my assertion.

    I guess my camera software must just be crazy slow, because im more used to real world 20MB/s read.

    I will still assert that you need a good high speed card reader, I have seen some cheapo ones that are garbage, but given Valve has full control of that, shouldn't be a problem.

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  • [–] 43 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    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

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

    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.

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

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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

    UHS II micro SD cards operate at 312MB/s

    That's pretty good.. It's like double a typical HDD read speed

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

    Read or write? I can hit the write sticker speed on mine, but read is terrible.

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

    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?

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

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    This heavily depends on the game. Which game were you testing?

    In my experience at least, small Indies and last-gen or earlier ports from console are fine, but games with frequent loading times and those designed for SSDs benefit from being installed to the internal storage.

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

    I'm not surprised it works that way on between steam deck and steam deck and the architecture is identical in terms of what steam needs

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    It's not identical? They are different architectires.

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

    I don't see the use case for myself. It's too easy to install it through Wifi onto local memory and unlike a cartridge, you can have it installed in as many devices as you share your account. I also would have little overlap between the games I'd run for each platform. I'd trade it for another built-in USB-C port in a heartbeat.

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

    This is pretty useful for people with bad internet (or data-capped, because that exists for some reason), especially with some games taking up 100+ gb

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    what does internet have to do with local transfers from PC to PC over wifi?

    wifi does not mean internet, and you can easily share games from PC to PC over wifi or ethernet via steam.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

    Instead of redownloading the game twice on a steam deck and steam machine (or steam frame) you could just take the same micro SD card out and insert it into the other device and play from there

    Edit: You could also copy a game's install files over to the SD card and move them directly if you really don't want to run the game directly off the SD card

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    Steam has long supported game transfer via local network. You just need to have both machines on the same network and turned on with one having the game installed already. When you start the download on the other device, it'll copy the files locally.

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