With just a microSD card, you’ll be able to easily bring your games across the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame.
Valve is making microSD cards the next game cartridges
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I mean its practically identical, if a little slower, compared to ssd for load times on the steamdeck, even for very large games. Idk what fanciness valve pulled but it works.
It'll be fine for most games you'd want to run on lower power stuff like the Frame/Deck.
Yeah, they worked well enough in the Switch (with some slowness in some games), but not for 50+GB games.
You can do that on any computer…
My laptop doesn't have an SD slot. Are they common?
You could use a usb sd card reader but it’s more a comment on how this is a nothing burger.
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.
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
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
Guessing the disk format used between both systems is identical too (at least from what I saw on my steam deck when using the tool integrated into SteamOS big picture)
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!
Oh was it a research vessel? Maybe that was part of the outrage is they just assumed he was buying a yacht? Now I'm interested in what type of research it's doing.
Yacht research