6 ms·
microSD cards are pretty cheap though.
by fetus8 5y ago
microSD 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.