A problem with the Steam Deck review

[Imbadatnames]

Watching the steam deck review I have an issue regarding the storage and the lack of coverage on it. 
 

The base model comes with 64GB of eMMC storage which according to Samsung the latest generation has about 250MB/s of transfer speed, roughly half of what the base 870 evo is capable of. The second point is that because if the paltry storage any large to medium size game will have to go into a SD card where the load times will be abysmal as the best microSD cards you can buy top out at 170MB/s max theoretical in reality you’re lucky to get 100 which is worse than a standard 7200RPM HDD. I wouldn’t call that useable and considering with the new consoles having SSDs most newer titles are built off of that. 

[KaitouX]

That was (shortly) covered in the hardware review. 

[Imbadatnames]

30 minutes ago, KaitouX said:

That was (shortly) covered in the hardware review. 

It’s a little bit too quick. Listing the spec and not going into why the base model is pretty much useless to play large games isn’t enough. Can you IMAGINE if say apple released a MacBook with a base model of 64GB of eMMC storage then all the other models had SSDs I can guarantee there’d be a 30 minute tirade on why apple is evil and scamming people. Valve just gets special treatment and I really don’t know why. 

[KaitouX]

14 minutes ago, Imbadatnames said:

It’s a little bit too quick. Listing the spec and not going into why the base model is pretty much useless to play large games isn’t enough. Can you IMAGINE if say apple released a MacBook with a base model of 64GB of eMMC storage then all the other models had SSDs I can guarantee there’d be a 30 minute tirade on why apple is evil and scamming people. Valve just gets special treatment and I really don’t know why. 

Maybe because this costs less than half of the price compared to similar devices? Or because you can add a MicroSD card that currently works fine or upgrade the SSD manually, and have the option to get 256GB and 512GB variants if you want? If said MacBook was half of the price compared to similar notebooks, had variants with more storage and were upgradable on top of that, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be criticized by most.

[Imbadatnames]

3 minutes ago, KaitouX said:

Maybe because this costs less than half of the price compared to similar devices? Or because you can add a MicroSD card that currently works fine or upgrade the SSD manually, and have the option to get 256GB and 512GB variants if you want? If said MacBook was half of the price compared to similar notebooks, had variants with more storage and were upgradable on top of that, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be criticized by most.

It’s more expensive than the switch. 
 

SD cards are slower than eMMC. 
 

My point is the Base model shouldn’t exist, funnily enough that’s not the one reviewers got but because it does exists reviewers shouldn’t ignore it. If any other company tried to pull that they would get picked up on it. It only exists so they can advertise “399” as the price which is what the PS5 DE cost. The real base cost is $530. 

[KaitouX]

4 minutes ago, Imbadatnames said:

It’s more expensive than the switch. 
 

SD cards are slower than eMMC. 
 

My point is the Base model shouldn’t exist, funnily enough that’s not the one reviewers got but because it does exists reviewers shouldn’t ignore it. If any other company tried to pull that they would get picked up on it. It only exists so they can advertise “399” as the price which is what the PS5 DE cost. The real base cost is $530. 

I was comparing against portable PCs, like Aya, GPD and similar, but if you want a switch comparison here it goes:

 

$300 Switch(Base) specs:

Custom Nvidia Tegra SOC

32GB of internal storage + microSD slot

4GB of LPDDR4X RAM

6.2" 1280x720 LCD screen

 

$350 Switch(OLED) specs:

Custom Nvidia Tegra SOC

64GB of internal storage + microSD slot

4GB of LPDDR4X RAM

7" 1280x720 OLED screen

 

$399 Steam Deck specs:

Custom AMD Zen2(4c8t)+RDNA2(8CUs) APU

64GB of internal storage+ microSD slot + upgradable SSD

16GB of LPDDR5 RAM

7" 1280x800 LCD screen

 

Seems a pretty fair price to me.

The base model exists for people that want the cheapest option possible or simply can't afford $500+ for a device like this. And again I have yet to see any mention of issues with running games from microSD, so I don't really see the point in complaining about the storage speed, at the moment it doesn't matter, and when it does matter you can upgrade the SSD if you want, that's an ok drawback for a cheaper device.

[xotzz]

Just now, KaitouX said:

I was comparing against portable PCs, like Aya, GPD and similar, but if you want a switch comparison here it goes:

 

$300 Switch(Base) specs:

Custom Nvidia Tegra SOC

32GB of internal storage + microSD slot

4GB of LPDDR4X RAM

6.2" 1280x720 LCD screen

 

$350 Switch(OLED) specs:

Custom Nvidia Tegra SOC

64GB of internal storage + microSD slot

4GB of LPDDR4X RAM

7" 1280x720 OLED screen

 

$399 Steam Deck specs:

Custom AMD Zen2(4c8t)+RDNA2(8CUs) APU

64GB of internal storage+ microSD slot + upgradable SSD

16GB of LPDDR5 RAM

7" 1280x800 LCD screen

 

Seems a pretty fair price to me.

The base model exists for people that want the cheapest option possible or simply can't afford $500+ for a device like this. And again I have yet to see any mention of issues with running games from microSD, so I don't really see the point in complaining about the storage speed, at the moment it doesn't matter, and when it does matter you can upgrade the SSD if you want, that's an ok drawback for a cheaper device.

I don't even know why people compare the Switch to the Deck.... Steam Deck is the only(and I mean that) portable PC that made me want it and that's mainly because of the price. Why would I care if the game takes +10 sec to load when I can buy the Deck at such a low price? The Switch is  for me.

[WolframaticAlpha]

4 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

It’s a little bit too quick. Listing the spec and not going into why the base model is pretty much useless to play large games isn’t enough. Can you IMAGINE if say apple released a MacBook with a base model of 64GB of eMMC storage then all the other models had SSDs I can guarantee there’d be a 30 minute tirade on why apple is evil and scamming people. Valve just gets special treatment and I really don’t know why. 

Difference being that macbooks cost 1000 usd+ and the Deck costs less than half that. 

3 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

It’s more expensive than the switch. 
 

SD cards are slower than eMMC. 
 

My point is the Base model shouldn’t exist, funnily enough that’s not the one reviewers got but because it does exists reviewers shouldn’t ignore it. If any other company tried to pull that they would get picked up on it. It only exists so they can advertise “399” as the price which is what the PS5 DE cost. The real base cost is $530. 

Just because you play AAA games doesn't mean everyone does. I would love to play the library of older games I have colected on the go. For many like us, 399 is a fair price.

 

Comparing the PS5 with the deck is literals apples with oranges. No one is saying(of very very few) are going to be choosing between a PS5, a home entertainment system and the Deck, a portable.

 

It is only 50-100 bucks more expensive, and for many it is going to be worth the 50 bucks extra. 

 

Remember, it may not seem like a big deal from where you are standing, but it is one from where others are standing.

[Kisai]

On 2/28/2022 at 5:23 AM, Imbadatnames said:

It’s a little bit too quick. Listing the spec and not going into why the base model is pretty much useless to play large games isn’t enough. Can you IMAGINE if say apple released a MacBook with a base model of 64GB of eMMC storage then all the other models had SSDs I can guarantee there’d be a 30 minute tirade on why apple is evil and scamming people. Valve just gets special treatment and I really don’t know why. 

 

eMMC is basically what Android smartphones use. It's likely just cheap. It's not very much faster than a 7200RPM hard drive either. MMC itself is the same as SD card storage up to a point. Where as iphones just straight up use flash memory you'd find on PCIe SSD's. 

 

The eMMC option should really just not exist, and I'm not sure why Valve even bothered. Perhaps the initial ambitions were for 8+ year old games like all the other devices in this category (eg GamePark devices.)

 

If it was intended to have PC-class performance, it should have picked parts you'd at least find in a gaming laptop with the same class of CPU+GPU. Not parts you'd find in the throw-away Android phones.

[Blademaster91]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

eMMC is basically what Android smartphones use. It's likely just cheap. It's not very much faster than a 7200RPM hard drive either. MMC itself is the same as SD card storage up to a point. Where as iphones just straight up use flash memory you'd find on PCIe SSD's. 

 

The eMMC option should really just not exist, and I'm not sure why Valve even bothered. Perhaps the initial ambitions were for 8+ year old games like all the other devices in this category (eg GamePark devices.)

 

If it was intended to have PC-class performance, it should have picked parts you'd at least find in a gaming laptop with the same class of CPU+GPU. Not parts you'd find in the throw-away Android phones.

Only the really cheap Android phones have eMMC storage, and at the price point its usually fine. If the Steam deck was SSD only with no cheaper option it would be $100 more expensive,  $399 for the lowest price Steam Deck is a good deal IMO. I've also heard you can upgrade the storage, however I haven't seen anyone tear down the cheapest version of the Steam Deck to install an M.2 SSD.

Having the option to play older games, or games I already own in my Steam library seems worth it in my opinion, and the Steam Deck can be used as a PC, there isn't anything else for $400 that competes with the steam deck.

[tkitch]

You clearly didn't watch the reviews of the SD very clearly.

 

Responsiveness on having a game on the internal SSD vs uSD was covered by multiple outlets, and the overall response was "Not that big a difference."

Valve clearly optimized things and the resulting experience is apparently just fine. 

[cmndr]

I suspect that a portion of the main drive is reserved for acting as a cache for the SD card.
if half your hits are coming from the main drive and half are coming from the SD card AND the SD card is mainly doing sequential reads (instead of a bunch of random IO) on relatively large block sizes you can get "good enough" performance.

Caching is pretty amazing. My NAS, which has 32GB RAM, 118GB optane and 4x HDDs is generally MORE performant than my internal nvme NAND SSD (loads thumbnails faster, loads games about as fast, etc.) after it's been warmed up. This is because 80-99.9% of the data requests at any one moment end up in cache and the stuff that isn't in cache is generally large, sequential reads (which HDDs are OK at). The cache mostly focuses on metadata (imagine a table that says WHERE on the drive(s) to look up data along with other bits of info) which is relatively small but requires a lot of operations. 4HDDs doing sequential reads peak out at about 1GBps which is in SSD territory - it's just HDDs take forever to find data and doing small random reads TANKS performance (think 0.00001GBps).

[Imbadatnames]

On 3/1/2022 at 8:46 PM, tkitch said:

You clearly didn't watch the reviews of the SD very clearly.

 

Responsiveness on having a game on the internal SSD vs uSD was covered by multiple outlets, and the overall response was "Not that big a difference."

Valve clearly optimized things and the resulting experience is apparently just fine. 

Valve didn’t send the eMMC models they sent the SSD models with higher storage 

[Imbadatnames]

On 3/1/2022 at 8:40 PM, Blademaster91 said:

Only the really cheap Android phones have eMMC storage, and at the price point its usually fine. If the Steam deck was SSD only with no cheaper option it would be $100 more expensive,  $399 for the lowest price Steam Deck is a good deal IMO. I've also heard you can upgrade the storage, however I haven't seen anyone tear down the cheapest version of the Steam Deck to install an M.2 SSD.

Having the option to play older games, or games I already own in my Steam library seems worth it in my opinion, and the Steam Deck can be used as a PC, there isn't anything else for $400 that competes with the steam deck.

You can’t upgrade the storage eMMC is soldered to the board and you can only up the storage with micro SD cards which are even slower 

 

The 400 model is thee to hit the price point and nothing else. They can market it at 399 which is more palatable than 530.

[Imbadatnames]

On 3/2/2022 at 7:15 AM, cmndr said:

I suspect that a portion of the main drive is reserved for acting as a cache for the SD card.
if half your hits are coming from the main drive and half are coming from the SD card AND the SD card is mainly doing sequential reads (instead of a bunch of random IO) on relatively large block sizes you can get "good enough" performance.

Caching is pretty amazing. My NAS, which has 32GB RAM, 118GB optane and 4x HDDs is generally MORE performant than my internal nvme NAND SSD (loads thumbnails faster, loads games about as fast, etc.) after it's been warmed up. This is because 80-99.9% of the data requests at any one moment end up in cache and the stuff that isn't in cache is generally large, sequential reads (which HDDs are OK at). The cache mostly focuses on metadata (imagine a table that says WHERE on the drive(s) to look up data along with other bits of info) which is relatively small but requires a lot of operations. 4HDDs doing sequential reads peak out at about 1GBps which is in SSD territory - it's just HDDs take forever to find data and doing small random reads TANKS performance (think 0.00001GBps).

Issue there is you’re using RAID and Optane which is specifically for using with HDDs. This ain’t that. IOPS are also important 

[YoungBlade]

On 2/28/2022 at 7:42 AM, Imbadatnames said:

Watching the steam deck review I have an issue regarding the storage and the lack of coverage on it. 
 

The base model comes with 64GB of eMMC storage which according to Samsung the latest generation has about 250MB/s of transfer speed, roughly half of what the base 870 evo is capable of. The second point is that because if the paltry storage any large to medium size game will have to go into a SD card where the load times will be abysmal as the best microSD cards you can buy top out at 170MB/s max theoretical in reality you’re lucky to get 100 which is worse than a standard 7200RPM HDD. I wouldn’t call that useable and considering with the new consoles having SSDs most newer titles are built off of that. 

What makes you think that the speed of the drive will be the primary limitation for loading games? Game loading can have multiple choke points, and an important one is the speed of the processor.

 

The 4c/8t and heavily power limited CPU is also going to limit the loading speed for games. It is quite possible that the storage medium won't make a meaningful difference, as the processing from unpacking files could be the bottleneck in many games.

 

This is something that certainly should be investigated, but it is not as cut and dry as you imply.

[FliP0x]

15 minutes ago, Imbadatnames said:

You can’t upgrade the storage eMMC is soldered to the board and you can only up the storage with micro SD cards which are even slower 

 

The 400 model is thee to hit the price point and nothing else. They can market it at 399 which is more palatable than 530.

But you can still provide your own 2230 M.2 SSD.

That leaves you with 64GB eMMC, NVMe of your choice and potentially a UHS-II MicroSD which should perform close to the eMMC.

[tkitch]

3 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

You can’t upgrade the storage eMMC is soldered to the board and you can only up the storage with micro SD cards which are even slower 

 

The 400 model is thee to hit the price point and nothing else. They can market it at 399 which is more palatable than 530.

incorrect:

 

In the Steam Deck teardown that Valve uploaded to YouTube, the 64GB Steam Deck variant does have an M.2 NVMe. The 64GB eMMC is an M.2 module so, while you cannot add more storage alongside the 64GB memory (64GB + 128/256/512GB SSD), you can remove the eMMC M.2 module and add an M.2 2230 SSD.

 

https://fossbytes.com/which-steam-deck-storage-variant-should-you-choose/

 

[cmndr]

12 hours ago, Imbadatnames said:

Issue there is you’re using RAID and Optane which is specifically for using with HDDs. This ain’t that. IOPS are also important 

So, optane is just a a brand for a specific type of SSD. The concept scales. I'm not technically using Optane caching(tm), I'm using optane for L2ARC with RAM as the main ARC. There is admitedly a boatload of data that can be cached (~900GB compressed) in ~150GB of cache.

4x HDDs in RAIDz1 (similar to RAID5) aren't going to offer the same IOPs as a cheap SD card.
 

 

The fact still remains, it's VERY possible to use both the internal SSD and a flash card in a caching based system where both are sharing the load (small blocks from the faster storage with better IOPS, large blocks from the slow storage). This can legitimately 2x the speed.

As it stands, in practice the SteamDeck appears to be fairly responsive, at the very least I'm not hearing bad things about its loading performance and Steam DID say that they're working to ensure it's performant.



https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-early-testing-shows-sd-card-loading-games-nearly-as-fast-as-ssd

 

Quote

As PC Gamer points out, YouTubers The Phawx and Linus have been measuring the load times of the Steam Deck with the SSD versus a game on the SD card, and have been finding there’s not a lot of difference at all in many games.

 

Linus reminds us that Valve has in the past claimed Steam Deck gamers would see similar load times with SSD and SD card, and that he frankly didn’t believe that, but admits that he was wrong, or at least appears to be from early testing, and that there’s “very little compromise” to the experience of running off a 1TB SD card.

 

[Mihle]

If speed had affected anything, they could have made it with full size SD card slot and supported faster cards, but those cards are more expensive.

[Giganthrax]

Unless you're playing games like Pillars of Eternity or Mortal Kombat that have a ton of loading screens, I really doubt your experience will be heavily impacted by the longer loading screens.

 

Also, keep in mind that the base Steam Deck model costs $400. Obviously, you're not going to get top-of-the-line performance. 

[Imbadatnames]

22 hours ago, tkitch said:

incorrect:

 

In the Steam Deck teardown that Valve uploaded to YouTube, the 64GB Steam Deck variant does have an M.2 NVMe. The 64GB eMMC is an M.2 module so, while you cannot add more storage alongside the 64GB memory (64GB + 128/256/512GB SSD), you can remove the eMMC M.2 module and add an M.2 2230 SSD.

 

https://fossbytes.com/which-steam-deck-storage-variant-should-you-choose/

 

Ignoring that m.2’s of that size aren’t really available and the ones that are cost around 200. 

[Imbadatnames]

15 hours ago, cmndr said:

So, optane is just a a brand for a specific type of SSD. The concept scales. I'm not technically using Optane caching(tm), I'm using optane for L2ARC with RAM as the main ARC. There is admitedly a boatload of data that can be cached (~900GB compressed) in ~150GB of cache.

4x HDDs in RAIDz1 (similar to RAID5) aren't going to offer the same IOPs as a cheap SD card.
 

 

The fact still remains, it's VERY possible to use both the internal SSD and a flash card in a caching based system where both are sharing the load (small blocks from the faster storage with better IOPS, large blocks from the slow storage). This can legitimately 2x the speed.

As it stands, in practice the SteamDeck appears to be fairly responsive, at the very least I'm not hearing bad things about its loading performance and Steam DID say that they're working to ensure it's performant.



https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-early-testing-shows-sd-card-loading-games-nearly-as-fast-as-ssd

 

 

Optane isn’t just a brand for an SSD dude. It’s a “system accelerator”. It’s literally to speed up HDDs. 
 

You’ve linked an article using games that load quickly anyway. 

[Blademaster91]

1 hour ago, Imbadatnames said:

Ignoring that m.2’s of that size aren’t really available and the ones that are cost around 200. 

There are M.2 2230 form factor SSD's on amazon, $20-30 for a 128GB, although the Steam Deck seems to be well optimized, from the reviews i've seen games load just fine from an SD card.

 

[tkitch]

1 hour ago, Imbadatnames said:

Ignoring that m.2’s of that size aren’t really available and the ones that are cost around 200. 

So how many times are you going to move the goalposts?

You made a disparaging statement, got proven wrong, only to decide you weren't happy with it, so you again change the rules?

2230 is a standard size for NVME.  Granted, it's not the most common, but it is a standard still.

And 1TB NVMEs are now being released in that formfactor.  I wouldn't be surprised to see 2 TB in the next year or two.

 

Also, we knew exactly what physical size the drive was last summer, so who cares?

 

Quote

Optane isn’t just a brand for an SSD dude. It’s a “system accelerator”. It’s literally to speed up HDDs. 
 

You’ve linked an article using games that load quickly anyway. 

Optane is also a class of SSDs used in servers.  Even in 2.5" Removable bays.

 

Amongst other things, it has a much higher R/W cycle than standard SSDs.