Last week, Valve surprised everyone by announcing a $400 Steam Deck handheld gaming PC. It's priced competitively, looks to run just about any game you can throw at it, and offers fast SSD storage options. But one feature Valve didn't mention until now is just how good the SD card gaming performance is.
As Rock Paper Shotgun reports, Lawrence Yang, a user interface and product designer at Valve, was asked on Twitter about the read and write speeds of an SD card being of concern. Could it result in really long load times or poor performance if the games streamed in content? It turns out that isn't an issue, with Yang revealing in a reply tweet that all the games played in IGN's reveal video were running off an SD card.
So all of the footage of the Steam Deck running games so far, be that Control, Portal 2, Death Stranding, Factorio, or Hades, has been from an SD card and not the internal eMMC or NVMe SSD drives. We haven't seen a full game load yet, so it may be noticeably slower on SD card, but that really comes down to your choice of card. What is clear, though, is that using an SD card doesn't seem to impact how the games play at all.
If you haven't already secured a Steam Deck pre-order, get ready for a very long wait. The reservation system now says new orders probably won't be fulfilled until Q2 2022 such is the popularity of this handheld. And of course, scalpers have already managed to push the price up to $4,000.