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Storage seems like it'll be an issue unless you only want to play indie games. It says it's got the hardware to play AAA games, but even last gen AAA games like
by hn8788 5y ago
Storage seems like it'll be an issue unless you only want to play indie games. It says it's got the hardware to play AAA games, but even last gen AAA games like Doom Eternal won't fit on the base model, and the next step up with more sufficient storage is more expensive than the next gen consoles.
- fetus8 5y agomicroSD cards are pretty cheap though.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoDoes anyone play AAA titles off of SD cards? Wouldn't it take forever to load stuff?
- philliphaydon 5y agoOn switch it isn’t an issue for 12gb games. But I couldn’t imagine trying to load an 80gb game. Especially if you needed to load stuff while playing.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoYeah - I imagine that the games are designed thinking most players probably have an SSD or - at worst - an HDD. An SD Card - especially a not-good one - can be 100x+ slower than an HDD for small reads. Any games that depend on this would effectively not be playable.
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoMicro SD cards are up to about ~290 MB/s for read times these days, IIRC. That's the same as low-end SSDs.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoThat's throughput. IOPS is important. For random 4kb blocks / second SD Card => 2.1 [1] SSD => ~200 [2] [1] https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/reviews/micro-sd-cards/ https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/reviews/micro-sd-cards/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS And that's comparing good SD cards to good SSDs. As I was saying, bad SD cards can be REALLY bad. The difference can be over 1000x. Anything that depends on being able to read ANY small piece of information regularly in a reasonable amount of time from disk would simply not be playable.
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoThat's assuming the games are writing to the SD cards and not the SSD though, right? If this is Debian/Arch OS, I'd assume they are writing to a system folder.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoNo - those are random READS - not writes. If the game is on the SD Card - it will be read from the SD card. Sure, if the game needs to randomly write data to disk (I assume this is much rarer) - then it would write to the system SSD as usual.
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoGot it. So SD cards are optimized for large, continuous file reads, not varied file reads.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoI'm not sure that's what they're optimized for. I think it's more of just that's how the technology works. It's the same way I wouldn't say that film is optimized for storing lots of data with horrible access cheaply. It just happens to be what it is.
- bserge 5y agoUsed to play them fine on hard drives. Micro SD cards became as fast as them quite a while ago.
- lonjil 5y agoI think it's about as fast as a regular hard drive. So I guess use that as a point of reference.
- hn8788 5y agoAll the next gen consoles have SSDs though, so games are going to be designed around that. Current AAA games might be playable on a microSD, but I doubt any of the AAA games currently in development will.
- bserge 5y agoYou're saying 100+ MB/s won't be enough anymore? Why would that be the case?
- hn8788 5y agoBecause the PS5 SSD does 5GB/s, and that's the kind of speeds new AAA games are going to be built around.
- chme 5y agoWell, those are PC games, optimized for all sorts of hardware, like spinning rust, where other stuff is happening in the background as well.
- hn8788 5y agoA lot of AAA games are built for PC and consoles, that's why you don't normally see much progress in graphics until a new console generation comes out. Current AAA games are also already recommending SSDs, so if people think they're going to have a good experience playing AAA games on an SD card, they're going to be dissapointed.
- bserge 5y agoOh right, NVMe. I have yet to experience it. Yeah, I suppose if the software is optimized for it, it is a much better experience. SD cards also have the drawback of having pretty limited write cycles compared to any SSD.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 5y ago
- partiallypro 5y agoAren't read speeds a little too slow for heavy game loading?
- Anunayj 5y agoWell for heavy gaming I doubt you'll be able to put any more power in such a small package. I don't think the target audience is heavy gamers, but mid-tier games.
- msie 5y agoYou'll probably be able to hack it and add your own NVME drive. Everything is standard and won't be locked down like Apple's hardware.