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Nintendo Switch firmware update 20.0.0 made load times for all my digital games worse

  • Thread starter Thread starter RyanXx
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RyanXx

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Ever since Nintendo Switch firmware update 20.0.0 from April last year (the update that added Virtual Game Cards to the Switch) load times for all my digital games became significantly worse. The only way I found to solve the issue was to re-download the games. The problem is that I have a large digital library on Switch, so every time now that I want to play a game in my digital library, I have to re-download the entire game unless I want a one minute load time for the game to start. Why is this happening? Doesn't seem like a coincidence that this started happening after a firmware update shortly before the Nintendo Switch 2 launched. Is Nintendo pushing firmware updates to their older systems to make performance worse? This seems like planned obsolescence nonsense straight out of Apple's playbook. Is anyone else having this issue too?

I am using a Nintendo Switch - OLED Model and it is not soft-modded with CFW.
 
What SD card are you using? I used to have a similar issue with my SanDisk Ultra, read speeds for games I installed first would get slower and slower over time, while newly installed/re-downloaded games would have read speeds at the expected rate, I've seen a few reports of people having the exact same issue in the past (also with SanDisk Ultra cards).
 
NinStar said:
What SD card are you using? I used to have a similar issue with my SanDisk Ultra, read speeds for games I installed first would get slower and slower over time, while newly installed/re-downloaded games would have read speeds at the expected rate, I've seen a few reports of people having the exact same issue in the past (also with SanDisk Ultra cards).
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's a SanDisk Ultra 400GB. I only bought it around 2 years ago. It's weird that I started noticing the problem right after I updated to 20.0.0 though, I wonder it was the update that messed up the card. Does that mean that the SD card is done for and I need a replacement? The card is basically full, so it was still inevitable that I was going to need to buy a new card anyway. Any recommendations for good 1TB cards? If I buy another SanDisk one, will I have this problem again?
 
Does reinstalling a game fix the long loadtime for that game permanently?

I have a relativly new 512gb sandisk and have the same problem with longer load times after updating to fw 20.4. Havent tried reinstalling the games yet though.

***update***

I tried copying a game to my PC using DBI, deleted it and installed it again. The loading time is much shorter now.
In DBI the download speed was 5-6Mb/s when downloading it the first time. After removing it and reinstalling it the download speed using DBI is about 30MB/s.

Can anyone explain what is going on?
 
Last edited by johsam,
johsam said:
Does reinstalling a game fix the long loadtime for that game permanently?

I have a relativly new 512gb sandisk and have the same problem with longer load times after updating to fw 20.4. Havent tried reinstalling the games yet though.
Click to expand...
For me, I think it's temporarily only. Might be wrong though.
 
RyanXx said:
Yeah, it's a SanDisk Ultra 400GB. I only bought it around 2 years ago. It's weird that I started noticing the problem right after I updated to 20.0.0 though, I wonder it was the update that messed up the card. Does that mean that the SD card is done for and I need a replacement? The card is basically full, so it was still inevitable that I was going to need to buy a new card anyway. Any recommendations for good 1TB cards? If I buy another SanDisk one, will I have this problem again?
Click to expand...
Yes, it is not a problem with the Switch, but rather with the SD card itself (if you use it in other devices, you'll notice the same pattern over time). Honestly I have no idea what the root cause is, I just know it is a problem that exists and that I and others have faced in the past.

I got a 1tb SanDisk Extreme (it was the most affordable option at the time, after the SanDisk Ultra and Lexar Play), it's been 3 years and I didn't have that issue happen to me ever since, my card is nearly full (28gb left) and games I downloaded a long time ago still have normal loading times.
 
Yes, I have noticed this too. On every game that has some download stuff the load times are really bad. Most of them work fine even with slow load times but the egregious one was Samba de Amigo Party Central. The game is very quick, but after the update, the song menu was stuttering and when you choose a song it got really slow to start. Tried uninstalling and downloading everything again and it worked. Unfortunately you have to uninstall through the console, choosing one by one on the Software Management screen (on the Switch, the executable is on the main memory even though the rest of the game data is on the SD card, that is why you need to truly uninstall, you cant just format the card on the computer to remove everything in bulk. If you format the card without uninstalling through the console, it "archives" the software), but the download process is easy, you can mark everything to redownload through the website and the console will do the rest, just let it redownload at night or when you are at work....
Post automatically merged:

NinStar said:
Yes, it is not a problem with the Switch, but rather with the SD card itself (if you use it in other devices, you'll notice the same pattern over time). Honestly I have no idea what the root cause is, I just know it is a problem that exists and that I and others have faced in the past.

I got a 1tb SanDisk Extreme (it was the most affordable option at the time, after the SanDisk Ultra and Lexar Play), it's been 3 years and I didn't have that issue happen to me ever since, my card is nearly full (28gb left) and games I downloaded a long time ago still have normal loading times.
Click to expand...
it wasnt storage degradation because my SD card was new (Sandisk Ultra 512GB) and after the update, it got slow. The only solution was to redownload everything, even update data from physical games

Formatting the entire console is possible as well, but I didnt want to lose my save games and to log in again, especially Pokemon which is not allowed to back up using Nintendo Switch Online. Uninstalling the games and redownloading still keep save data (unlike the Wii U which, if you decided to uninstall a game it would get rid of the save progress). The save data is always saved on the Console Memory no matter where the game data is stored.
 
Last edited by Sonic3320,
Sonic3320 said:
Yes, I have noticed this too. On every game that has some download stuff the load times are really bad. Most of them work fine even with slow load times but the egregious one was Samba de Amigo Party Central. The game is very quick, but after the update, the song menu was stuttering and when you choose a song it got really slow to start. Tried uninstalling and downloading everything again and it worked. Unfortunately you have to uninstall through the console, choosing one by one on the Software Management screen (on the Switch, the executable is on the main memory even though the rest of the game data is on the SD card, that is why you need to truly uninstall, you cant just format the card on the computer to remove everything in bulk. If you format the card without uninstalling through the console, it "archives" the software), but the download process is easy, you can mark everything to redownload through the website and the console will do the rest, just let it redownload at night or when you are at work....
Click to expand...
Does deleting and reinstalling the games revert the loading times back to the way they were on previous firmware versions? I'm asking because when I updated to firmware 20, games would take more than twice longer to load. Even small games like Cosmo Dreamer, which are less than 500MB, went from around 40 seconds to almost 2 minutes to load. Smash Bros. (with mods) went from 4 minutes to more than 7. Had to go back to firmware 19 because everything was too sluggish, but there's a couple of games now that I want to play that won't work on that firmware, even when replacing their SDK.
 

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