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[Deck] Issues playing games while installing/downloading games on SD card? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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I’ve been having random issues playing games (various) while downloading games to my SD card.

For example:

I’m downloading Mass Effect Legendary and wanted the game to continue to download in the background on my SD card. I play Cyberpunk 2077 for a bit, and after about 15 minutes the deck crashes and restarts.

I then tested the opposite, playing a game on my SD card while downloading a game to the SSD. Same issue.

Anyone else seeing this? Could be a bad or failing SD card. It takes ages for anything to write to it. I have reformatted it in the past and disabled WiFi Power Control under the dev settings to try to “fix” the hills and valleys while I install games on it over 2-3 GB.

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[–] 9 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Downloading/installing games actually has a significant performance hit. I would usually only recommend playing low performance impact games while downloading/installing.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 child)

    I'm not sure if it's related, but recently on my desktop I've been torrenting about a dozen of Linux ISOs* to my hard drive and the whole fucking system was freezing for multiple seconds and completely unusable.

    The OS is installed on an NVME. No CPU core was above 5-10% use. RAM usage was below 20%. SWAP was barely touched. No programs opened besides qbittorrent and VPN.

    Just opening the main menu or typing something in the search bar took 3-10 seconds depending on the lag spike... When I stopped the torrents, after a minute everything was buttery smooth again.

    It kinda reminded me of the issues I had when I mounted my NAS on boot. Dolphin would slow down to a crawl when opening home, even though it had nothing to do with the NAS ...

    Something is seriously borked with KDE Plasma and slow secondary storage.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    I've had serious issues with KDE freezing or being slow on desktop in the past, it's part of why I swapped off of it. I think I did have a failing secondary SSD at the time, so you could be on to something. Gnome worked a lot better on that PC than KDE did at the time, although I eventually dropped both for Hyprland.

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    • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    There’s an ssd mode in CP2077, try turning that off

    High-end games will hammer whatever storage you’re using, I have no issues running rimworld and downloading games, but wouldn’t expect CP2077 and downloading at the same time

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 days ago

    Ah it’s no big deal. Just a behavioral issue on my end then.

    I wouldn’t care if the SD card wrote a bit faster. I mean I get approximately 20-50 Mbps down from Steam. Taking ~12 hours to download 100 gigs to an SD card is a little insane.

    I can do the same process on my SSD in ~1 hour for what it’s worth.

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    • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    I think Steam downloads are heavily compressed, and decompressing them is CPU intensive. As soon as a download finishes, my PC`s fans crank up like a jet engine while the game or update is being installed. The Deck doesn't have the same available overhead, so it can struggle while installing stuff.

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