Playing off SD Card?

[Carlo Mig]

I have a Steam Deck that I'm about to sell. I figured why not use the SD Card on my RTX 4060 Laptop instead since it's only 512gb. My question is, can playing on an SD Card on a normal gaming laptop/pc be viable? I know it works on a Steam Deck but IDK

[Ettanin]

Possible but not recommended. Speeds of SD cards tend to be very limited.

[metamec]

Yes, it's possible, but it's suboptimal for many times of game on a system which lets you play games at higher resolutions. Textures will be larger and loading times will be slower than with an SSD. This can pose a problem for open world and graphically demanding games in particular. Steam Deck limits transfer speeds to UHS-I (slower than most mechanical drives) but your actual SD card may be UHS-II or UHS-III I suppose.

[Carlo Mig]

Originalmente postado por metamec:

Yes, it's possible, but it's suboptimal for many times of game on a system which lets you play games at higher resolutions. Textures will be larger and loading times will be slower than with an SSD. This can pose a problem for open world and graphically demanding games in particular. Steam Deck limits transfer speeds to UHS-I (slower than most mechanical drives) but your actual SD card may be UHS-II or UHS-III I suppose.

Hmm never thought about resolution and graphics being a factor. I mostly played on 800p 40 fps on medium with AAA games on my steam deck so thats probably why my SD Card didn't felt slow. I'll still try though.

My sd card is a Sandisk Gameplay which is a UHS-I and a fairly fast w/r speeds at 130/190.

[metamec]

Yeah, it's something I would probably experiment with too! Games are basically optimised for lower resolution on SteamDeck, which is partly why it works so well. If you want to play games natively at resolutions like 1080p or greater (even cheap laptops seem to have 1080p displays minimum now), you might notice problems with blurry slow loading textures in games like Elden Ring, GTA, etc. Cards like the Sandisk Gameplay are great, but they are really targeted at mobile devices because they make all kinds of optimisations to make games run smoothly.