All 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.

You're saying 100+ MB/s won't be enough anymore? Why would that be the case?

Because the PS5 SSD does 5GB/s, and that's the kind of speeds new AAA games are going to be built around.

We still have yet to see if that will actually become a standard going forward. Sure there's probably gonna be some fancy games without loading screens doing crazy content-streaming tricks to show of the new console hardware, but in the long-term, studios may decide it's not worth the time and effort compared to just having a loading screen that loads the whole level in a big chunk.

Plus you're gonna be targeting a much wider userbase for the time being by not targeting SSDs.

I think there's the argument that most studios will do whatever's easiest. Only a few will really try to be fancy and use the new hardware to the utmost, right?

So then yeah, sticking with a load screen _might_ be easiest. But if the tooling supports it, it might be even easier to just not worry about loading and having to make a loading screen, and let the engine handle that stuff for you. UE5 at least seems to be going in that direction.

Well, those are PC games, optimized for all sorts of hardware, like spinning rust, where other stuff is happening in the background as well.

A 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.

Oh 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.

NVMe does next to nothing to PC games (compared to an SSD). Direct Storage (Windows 11) requires a minimum of 1TB.

Being not NVMe is enough to call it slow

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

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.

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.

Micro SD cards are up to about ~290 MB/s for read times these days, IIRC. That's the same as low-end SSDs.

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/

[2] 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.

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.

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.

Got it. So SD cards are optimized for large, continuous file reads, not varied file reads.

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.

Used to play them fine on hard drives. Micro SD cards became as fast as them quite a while ago.

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

Aren't read speeds a little too slow for heavy game loading?

Well 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.