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[IbizaPocholo]

Valve Halves Steam Deck SSD Bandwidth on Some Models

Valve says this change will not affect gaming performance

www.tomshardware.com

According to a report by HardwareLuxx, Valve has made a spec change to the Steam Deck's SSD specs on May 28 that has largely flown under the radar. The change allows the use of two drive configurations instead of just one, cutting the potential SSD bandwidth in half for some models. As a result, the PCIe Gen 3 NVMe drive built into the higher-end models will now come with access to either four PCIe lanes (x4) or two lanes (x2). However, customers won't know which drives they'll receive, with the company noting that, "Some 256GB and 512GB models will ship with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD."

Valve says that it tested the change and it will not affect gaming performance. Here's Valve's description of the change:

"256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2*)
512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2*)

*Some 256GB and 512GB models ship with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD. In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4."

Valve doesn't say why it made the change, but there are still a number of NVMe SSDs on the market that only support two PCIe Gen 3 lanes. In fairness, SSDs of this caliber are still very capable drives, and much faster than SSDs with the SATA 3 interface. With a two-lane SSD running at Gen 3 speeds, you can still receive up to 2048 MB/s of bandwidth, which is four times greater than SATA SSDs. However, that's half the theoretical peak of the x4 connection found in some models. As a reminder, only a handful of games made today can utilize the full storage bandwidth of an SSD. For more details on SSDs, check out our Best SSDs article.

The 256GB and 512GB NVMe models are the only models receiving this change. The baseline 64GB model will stay the same with its much slower eMMC drive running on a PCIe Gen 2 x1 configuration. There is also no option to choose, or know, which type of drive you'll receive — it appears to be a bit of a lottery. We're reaching out to Valve for more detail.

Valve also confirmed that the spec changes are only for the NVMe drives, while the high-speed MicroSD slot will remain identical between all three variants.

 

[OverHeat]

CrustyBritches hope your new unit don’t suffer from this.

 

[CrustyBritches]

So does it affect the actual performance?

 

[Grildon Tundy]

Valve says that it tested the change and it will not affect gaming performance.

So does it affect the actual performance?

If you take Valve's word for it, no.

 

[legacy24]

and this is why you don't trust Valve with hardware

 

[RedPyramidHead]

I wish kingpotato was around so I could ask him about the NVMe in his Steam Deck.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

I'm ordering 3 more Decks.

 

[teezzy]

Suck my deck, gaben

 

[LazyParrot]

Any game where this would even remotely matter (and there are exactly zero out right now) wouldn’t run on a Steam Deck anyway.

 

[CrustyBritches]

CrustyBritches hope your new unit don’t suffer from this.

Looks like I got the PCIe 3.0 x4. I'd be interested in seeing the same benchmark for the gen 3.0 x2 drive.

 

[Pagusas]

it won’t affect performance *right now.

Direct storage is coming and is a complete unknown, for all we know right now nvme bandwidth will become a very important thing soon. Would really suck to see a performance impact in the future when you paid the exact same price for lesser hardware.

is the nvme user replaceable?

 

[ReBurn]

it won’t affect performance *right now.

Direct storage is coming and is a complete unknown, for all we know right now nvme bandwidth will become a very important thing soon. Would really suck to see a performance impact in the future when you paid the exact same price for lesser hardware.

is the nvme user replaceable?

How many people are installing Windows vs sticking with SteamOS?

 

[Pagusas]

How many people are installing Windows vs sticking with SteamOS?

The concepts behind direct storage will quickly be moved over, is AMD’s Smart Access Storage API windows only?

 

[Shmunter]

it won’t affect performance *right now.

Direct storage is coming and is a complete unknown, for all we know right now nvme bandwidth will become a very important thing soon. Would really suck to see a performance impact in the future when you paid the exact same price for lesser hardware.

is the nvme user replaceable?

This is the sort of stuff that holds back forward movement.

 

[ReBurn]

The concepts behind direct storage will quickly be moved over, is AMD’s Smart Access Storage API windows only?

What incentive does Microsoft have to port it to SteamOS? Microsoft makes Windows. AMD has incentive to make their API more broadly accessible. Microsoft doesn't have any reason to care beyond Windows.

 

[Magic Carpet]

I suspect that finding SSD parts is the reason no one can find a PS5. No evidence just a pull it out my butt thought.

 

[j0hnnix]

Can I just get my damn Q3 order email.. Valve just hold off on doing anything else.. I want my big deck In my hands.

 

[baphomet]

I suspect that finding SSD parts is the reason no one can find a PS5. No evidence just a pull it out my butt thought.

What are you even talking about?

Those are probably the least difficult to find parts.

 

[Magic Carpet]

What are you even talking about?

Those are probably the least difficult to find parts.

I’m talking about this report about a Toshiba production issue that scrapped A buttload of supply back in Feb this year.
https://about.kioxia.com/ja-jp/news/2022/20220210-1.html

This created a shortage of parts. What I cant find out is if these parts are what make up the six chips that together make up the internal SSD of the ps5. I also can’t find any price of those chips. So if They are the least difficult to find I am curious Where you found them and what Sony is paying for them.

 

[rofif]

CrustyBritches hope your new unit don’t suffer from this.

There is nothing to suffer.
The ssd in stead deck is barely faster than sd card. This won’t change anything

 

[sinnergy]

It’s to improve production.. more devices in peoples hands, good choices.

 

[Spukc]

Glad i got mine asap

 

[Crayon]

Seems sketchy. I wouldn't mind for my own, tho. I may or may not keep my preorder but this would effect anything I intend to do with it. The whole deck is going to need an upgrade before this becomes a bottleneck for games.

 

[Fess]

Ah another hardware lottery, lovely. Glad I got mine early, I’ve catched all the bad ones in previous lotteries; coil whine PS5, jet engine Steam Deck, jet engine PS4, 3xRROD 360, loud PS3 without casing screws, Wii with GPU fault pixels, etc etc.

 

[DenchDeckard]

Wow, I'm a q3 pre order and I might just cancel now.

I was going for the 512 version. They should let us choose to cancel and not lose our 5 pounds with this news.

 

[Panajev2001a]

This is the sort of stuff that holds back forward movement.

PC software progress standardisation has terrible jumps to overcome thanks to things like this…

 

[Filben]

So does it affect the actual performance?

I've read that even the difference between eMMC and NVMe are miniscule in real game performance and loading times and if that's true I doubt this here will have any significance.

 

[CrustyBritches]

There is nothing to suffer.
The ssd in stead deck is barely faster than sd card. This won’t change anything

That could be true for game loading times, but there's other aspects that function faster with the NVMe than a SD card.

I have a "up to 100MB/s" SanDisk microSD and 512GB internal SSD. I tested 8GB LEGO: Hobbit download twice on each drive. SSD had times of 2m54s and 2m45s, while SD had times of 4m56s and 4m45s.

Let's say you want to do emulation. To transfer WiiU DK Tropical Freeze(10GB) from external SSD to Deck it took 25s on internal SSD and 5m5s on SD.
---
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On the subject of Gen 3x2 vs Gen 3x4, a lot of the listings for older drives are gone, but I was able to find Silicon Power Gen 3x2 with up to 1600MB/s read and 1000MB/s write. That's versus 2400MB/s read and 1200MB/s write on the Deck Gen 3x4 drive. Don't know what the specs of the Deck Gen 3x2 SSD are, but the write speeds between the aforementioned drives are really close, so even when considering download times or transferring large emu games the difference would be quite small compared to NVMe vs SD.

 

[Bluntman]

It's not a problem, since the built in SSD in the Steam Deck can't saturate PCI-E 4x, so that's not a bottleneck.

And actually de eMMC version is the fastest in loading, since that has faster reading than the NVMe versions.

 

[SeraphJan]

Does anyone have a metric for how is the Deck selling currently?

 

[rkofan87]

Can I just get my damn Q3 order email.. Valve just hold off on doing anything else.. I want my big deck In my hands.

this.

 

[SScorpio]

Wow, I'm a q3 pre order and I might just cancel now.

I was going for the 512 version. They should let us choose to cancel and not lose our 5 pounds with this news.

You don't lose the deposit. I'm not sure of the timing, but if you cancel with something like 30-60 days you can get it refunded to however you paid for it. After that, you'll get it back as Steam credit.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

PC software progress standardisation has terrible jumps to overcome thanks to things like this…

In current games that are just not architected around NVME SSD bandwidth, yes.

Once devs finish re-tooling their engines to take advantage of the PS5/XBSX and Direct Storage very high bandwidth SSD technologies, the differences in these Steam Deck model's performance will be apparent.

In the very worst case, Steam Deck users with the gimped hardware will end up cut out of being able to play certain games at playable performance, or at the very least will be penalized with worse pop-in and loading performance for losing the lottery on their hardware purchase even though they paid the same price as other users with twice the bandwidth.

This is short-sighted on Valve's part at best, and at worst pretty scummy if they know the above and still went ahead with this change.

 

[Fess]

Does anyone have a metric for how is the Deck selling currently?

If you google on that you can find some weekly manufacture numbers and they reported it as best selling on Steam for I don’t how many weeks, but I don’t think anybody know anything tbh. They’re selling all they can manufacture at least, possibly with a higher manufacture rate after these changes we talk about here.

 

[BWJinxing]

While scummy, I don't think it make a difference.

All that direct storage stuff is useless when the deck itself won't be able to achieve the graphic settings that require all that processing

 

[PhaseJump]

Non issue.

Think of Deck as a game console, and bear in mind that it's performance is generally consistent. There is no change to "suffer" here.

People who knee jerk this revelation and cancel are insincere fucking clowns. It's a low/mid tier game PC in handheld game console format, with a game console UI and an optional PC desktop environment. Touch grass.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

Difference in game loading times between a good SATA3 SSD (~550 MB/s) and a good NVMe SSD (~3000 MB/s) is very minuscule.

Doubt there’s any noticeable difference at all. Maybe that’ll eventually change with direct storage.

 

[Sleepwalker]

I preordered the 64gb one and will be installing a ssd of my choice so non issue for me.

 

[Silver Wattle]

Doesn't that drop the theoretical limit from 3500MBps to 1750MBps? I'd hardly call that a small difference.

 

[Panajev2001a]

In current games that are just not architected around NVME SSD bandwidth, yes.

Once devs finish re-tooling their engines to take advantage of the PS5/XBSX and Direct Storage very high bandwidth SSD technologies, the differences in these Steam Deck model's performance will be apparent.

In the very worst case, Steam Deck users with the gimped hardware will end up cut out of being able to play certain games at playable performance, or at the very least will be penalized with worse pop-in and loading performance for losing the lottery on their hardware purchase even though they paid the same price as other users with twice the bandwidth.

This is short-sighted on Valve's part at best, and at worst pretty scummy if they know the above and still went ahead with this change.

Oh I was certainly not justifying this, just stating that the hardware variety can be a strong enemy to progress of software (see DirectStorage like technologies adoption on PC vs consoles, etc…).

It is scummy to say “oh no observed performance issues if we downgrade something (and keep price the same)” because of what you summarised there, yes… no performance issue now until software progresses and bam! you have now fragmented the SteamDeck userbase and fundamentally changed the hardware profile while people have preorders still open.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Difference in game loading times between a good SATA3 SSD (~550 MB/s) and a good NVMe SSD (~3000 MB/s) is very minuscule.

Doubt there’s any noticeable difference at all. Maybe that’ll eventually change with direct storage.

Maybe? If it does not DirectStorage and the like would suck … so yeah, expect it to.

 

[Crayon]

In current games that are just not architected around NVME SSD bandwidth, yes.

Once devs finish re-tooling their engines to take advantage of the PS5/XBSX and Direct Storage very high bandwidth SSD technologies, the differences in these Steam Deck model's performance will be apparent.

In the very worst case, Steam Deck users with the gimped hardware will end up cut out of being able to play certain games at playable performance, or at the very least will be penalized with worse pop-in and loading performance for losing the lottery on their hardware purchase even though they paid the same price as other users with twice the bandwidth.

This is short-sighted on Valve's part at best, and at worst pretty scummy if they know the above and still went ahead with this change.

By the time that happens the whole deck will no longer be a high performance device. I'm not sure it would be doing super great on those future games with any io speed . Steam deck 2 might even be out.

 

[Fess]

Oh I was certainly not justifying this, just stating that the hardware variety can be a strong enemy to progress of software (see DirectStorage like technologies adoption on PC vs consoles, etc…).

It is scummy to say “oh no observed performance issues if we downgrade something (and keep price the same)” because of what you summarised there, yes… no performance issue now until software progresses and bam! you have now fragmented the SteamDeck userbase and fundamentally changed the hardware profile while people have preorders still open.

Yeah I agree on that last bit. And worst thing, you don’t know what you’re getting. They should’ve lowered the price and detailed the new model, could’ve used that to increase the sales since the current top model is expensive.

 

[Panajev2001a]

By the time that happens the whole deck will no longer be a high performance device. I'm not sure it would be doing super great on those future games with any io speed . Steam deck 2 might even be out.

Not sure it would inspire much trust in Steam Deck 2 is specs get worse based on how Valve feels that day even on the most expensive model they have.

 

[MadViking]

People thinking that DS soon becomes mandatory, come on, this won't happen in years.. By the time it's true the deck will long be legacy device.

Also deck isn't even that fast in the first place. Expecting it to run high end games is a bit nonsense.

 

[Panajev2001a]

People thinking that DS soon becomes mandatory, come on, this won't happen in years.. By the time it's true the deck will long be legacy device.

Also deck isn't even that fast in the first place. Expecting it to run high end games is a bit nonsense.

It is a shitty move, period.

 

[MadViking]

It is a shitty move, period.

I never said it wasn't lol

 

[64bitmodels]

weird move, just because it doesnt affect performance now doesnt mean it wont in the future
then again you can always replace the SSD anyways and in the future valve would have had more models of steam deck to go around, with SSDs far more powerful than this

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

By the time that happens the whole deck will no longer be a high performance device. I'm not sure it would be doing super great on those future games with any io speed . Steam deck 2 might even be out.

"By the time that happens"... what do you mean this year?

 

[Skifi28]

Does anyone have a metric for how is the Deck selling currently?

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About this much, but don't take my word for it.