Steam Deck - Valve Made Sure Games From SD Cards Work Well
The Steam Deck console is designed so that games installed on SD cards run fast enough. Journalists who tested the device, mostly played games that use this solution.
One of the most important events of recent weeks turned out to be the announcement of Steam Deck. The device looks very promising, but many gamers have doubts about some aspects of this hardware. One of them is the question of speed of games installed on microSD cards. It turns out that there is no need to worry, as this solution seems to perform very well in action.
Lawrence Yang from Valve has revealed that all videos from Steam Deck tests and gameplay impressions recorded by IGN were based on games installed on a microSD card. The footage shows that the games worked well, and it's easy to expand the storage capacity of the device. Of course, games installed on Steam Deck's internal drive will run faster, but even if we put them on a microSD card, we will still retain high comfort of play. This certainly required a lot of work from the designers at Valve.
This is important information, because the cheapest model Steam Deck costing $399 will offer only 64 GB of internal eMMC memory. The variant with a 256 GB NVMe SSD is priced at $529 and with 512 GB - at $649. So more space for games will require us to pay quite a lot. The possibility of using microSD cards to increase the capacity of the device is therefore a noteworthy alternative. We'll lose out on the loading speed, but the price difference is large enough that many people won't mind, especially if the high comfort of play is maintained.
Another priority for Valve was the ability to quickly resume games. Steam Deck will feature a button that will enable us to save our current game state and then resume it instantly. Such a solution was crucial due to the portable nature of the device, so the APU prepared by AMD from the beginning was designed with this feature in mind.
We remind that since last week you can reserve Steam Deck. Only one console can be purchased on a single Steam account, and shipping will begin in December 2021.
