It's such an obvious and simple thing but it really feels revolutionary and high-tech.
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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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.
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
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.
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
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.
what? or just transfer from PC to PC via wifi through steam negating any SD card..
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE43
use PC 1 that already has it downloaded and installed, and have pc2 download from PC 1.. why worry about a 3rd hard drive or rehoming the SD card and potentially screwing the file structure up by potentially inserting Linux (steam deck) into what I can only assume would be a Windows based pc
Because if you are on a steam deck and just install it on the SD card to begin with I guarantee you it's faster to pop out the SD card and insert it into the other device than it is to copy the files over a network, especially if one of those devices is a VR headset.
Besides, more options to do the same thing isn't necessarily a bad thing. People can pick whichever they like best. If someone has games already installed on an SD card in their steam deck and want to quickly move them over to a steam machine or steam frame then this would be super convenient for them.
This is also specifically an article about the steam deck, steam frame, and steam machine so all of the devices would be using SteamOS and not Windows anyway. Not really sure why you're bringing up Windows.
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 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.
UHS II micro SD cards operate at 312MB/s
That's pretty good.. It's like double a typical HDD read speed
Read or write? I can hit the write sticker speed on mine, but read is terrible.
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?
Fat32, its a card for a camera
Definitely want to make sure atime is turned off on computers for that if possible
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.
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.
Yeah, I have Steam installed on an SSD in my Kubuntu machine, but it's kinda small, so I have the library pointing to an internal 2Gb HDD. It runs RDR2 flawlessly.
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.
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.
Are you using the real internal storage or emulated? Emulated internal storage is still on the 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?
You remember an era before streaming assets and preloading optimization lol. Also HDD are terrible at random IO amd transactional latency. Sequential read isn't the issue never was it was random IO and seek latency. You had to wait for the HDD to even get to the data in the first place to even start reading it. much like an SSD, SD cards don't suffer from that transactional latency.
Anyway the "larger" games I've played is probably cyberpunk, DRG, and i guess overwatch? I'm not exactly a huge AAA person I like a lot of indie titles. Vein is probably the most recent game on my list since its early access. A lot of historical games would be factorio, satisfactory, Dyson Sphere program, rimworld, valheim, endless dungeon, Risk of rain 2, things like that.
Settings are usually whatever max i can maintain near 60 with. First sacrifice is always shadows and extra lighting before textures
Maybe you have better SD cards, but mine are just terrible (150MB/s on the label, but real world reads are 20MB/s, random IO also seems trash but I dont have any numbers for that), so I have a tough time believing that their sufficient, even with streaming IO. Next time I get a chance I'll install a game on it and give it a whirl, but I'm pretty pessimistic.
Keep in mind that on Windows this is pretty much guaranteed to fail because Windows is trash at dealing with IO. A hilarious fact if you install Windows on a virtual machine running under a Linux host it will get better IO benchmarks than if you were to install Windows on that machine bare metal.
It's also constantly thrashing the system with a bunch of b******* background IO so a big part of why this can work is that steamos is using Linux lol
I also run a lot of games off an SD card in my deck. Dragon age veilguard is probably the most demanding I've played off an SD card it didn't have issues.
I know whenever I purchase an SD card for the deck or something demanding I do a decent bit of research. There are a bunch of different terms/specs on SD cards that impact performance, more than just 150 MB/s. Perhaps the SD card you have isn't the best for gaming, or maybe it's a dud card or a crappy manufacturer.
Streaming assets is precisely the reason for fast i/o. There's a reason technologies like DirectStorage and its PS5 equivalent exist.
It'll be fine for most games you'd want to run on lower power stuff like the Frame/Deck.
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.
Yeah, they worked well enough in the Switch (with some slowness in some games), but not for 50+GB games.
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
It's not identical? They are different architectires.
What does the architecture of the CPU have to do with the disk format? Nothing lol, linux arm can use ext4, btrfs, xfs etc same as it's x86 counterpart
~~Any binaries saved on the SD card would need to be duplicated to both x86 and ARM.~~
No they have FEX which translates x86 to arm instructions
Despite being ARM CPUs and Linux based machines, I'm pretty sure most of what they play is Windows x86 binaries.
Sure but with FEX it shouldn’t matter
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)
There will be like 2 decent games that are going to work with this. Out of anything, I couldn't care about onboard processing, most all of the VR games worth playing need a 3070+ for any decent fidelity at 60fps.
Most games should work actually, there will be exceptions but in general the game data is all that's stored on the SD card, your saves and config data are stored in your user folder.
Some games get this wrong and store data in the game data folder but that's heavily discouraged. Some games also conflate save data and config data which is annoying when jumping from different devices but that's it.