6 ms·

Does anyone play AAA titles off of SD cards? Wouldn't it take forever to load stuff?

philliphaydon 5y ago
On 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 ago
  Yeah - 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 ago
    Micro 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 ago
      That'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 ago
        That'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 ago
        No - 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 ago
        Got it. So SD cards are optimized for large, continuous file reads, not varied file reads.
        onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        I'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 ago
  Used to play them fine on hard drives. Micro SD cards became as fast as them quite a while ago.
lonjil 5y ago
I think it's about as fast as a regular hard drive. So I guess use that as a point of reference.

On 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 ago
Yeah - 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 ago
  Micro 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 ago
    That'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 ago
      That'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 ago
        No - 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 ago
        Got it. So SD cards are optimized for large, continuous file reads, not varied file reads.
        onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        I'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 ago
Used to play them fine on hard drives. Micro SD cards became as fast as them quite a while ago.

lonjil 5y ago

I think it's about as fast as a regular hard drive. So I guess use that as a point of reference.