Certain games stuttering only on emunand?

[DrippyB]

For some reason Metroid Prime Remastered has moments usually walking through doors, where it stutters and very briefly drops down into the 30s, then goes right back up in the 60s until like its loading shaders or something. Its rather common and pretty noticeable. I didnt remember the game behaving like this before on a non modded switch and sure enough when i installed it onto the sysnand, game ran buttery locked 60fps. I saw people mentioning that something like this happening could be a sign of a failing sd card, so I transferred it to the Sd card on the sysnand side and still had a buttery smooth 60fps. Same version i dumped myself between both nands so i know it wasnt a bad dump of the game. Even when checking my sd card in hekate everything checked out and i dont have another laying around to test. It is formatted as exFAT instead of Fat32 which ive read can cause compatibility issues but ive never had this issue in any other game that ive noticed before. Using an Oled system with file based nand. Anyone have any clue what could be causing this and how i could fix it?

Found a post about someone mentioning file based nand being the culprit as they experienced similar behavior that went away when converting to partition based.

Can anyone running a file based nand confirm metroid prime remastered has huge framerate dips on their end? Seems like some time and work to convert a 500gb Sd card filled to the brim formatted in exFat to a partitioned based nand formatted in Fat32 without losing any data and Im not familiar with how to do it much less do I want to do it for nothing if it ends up not solving it. Would be greatly appreciated.

 

[thesjaakspoiler]

SD cards are in general a slower than the internal emmc because the emmc has more datalines and the emmc is of decent quality.
SD cards also can have very big performance difference depending on the brand.
My Chinese knock-off card is definitely much slower than my SanDisk card.
You get what you pay for.

A file base emummc give a bit more overhead than a partition based emummc because the file system does much more bookkeeping, thus slowing things down.
With a partition, the data just has it's fixed place while the pieces of a file can be put anywhere if there is space free.
I don't think that FAT32 vs exFat will make much of a difference when reading large amounts of data.
exFat works great on the Switch until the Switch messes it up completely.

Filling up your SD card completely can also negatively affect the the read performance.
Large data files can become scattered all over the SD card and the SD card with have to switch internally between a lot of blocks to gather all the data.

A bad SD card can be a cause but that is hard to test without wiping the entire card.
If you don't have game suddenly failing then I would not consider this an issue at first.

Since you have a file based emummc, just copy the whole SD card over to a PC.
Then you can safely try to set up a partition based emummc.
If it doesn't work, then just remove the parition, format the card and put all the file back.

 

[DrippyB]

SD cards are in general a slower than the internal emmc because the emmc has more datalines and the emmc is of decent quality.
SD cards also can have very big performance difference depending on the brand.
My Chinese knock-off card is definitely much slower than my SanDisk card.
You get what you pay for.

A file base emummc give a bit more overhead than a partition based emummc because the file system does much more bookkeeping, thus slowing things down.
With a partition, the data just has it's fixed place while the pieces of a file can be put anywhere if there is space free.
I don't think that FAT32 vs exFat will make much of a difference when reading large amounts of data.
exFat works great on the Switch until the Switch messes it up completely.

Filling up your SD card completely can also negatively affect the the read performance.
Large data files can become scattered all over the SD card and the SD card with have to switch internally between a lot of blocks to gather all the data.

A bad SD card can be a cause but that is hard to test without wiping the entire card.
If you don't have game suddenly failing then I would not consider this an issue at first.

Since you have a file based emummc, just copy the whole SD card over to a PC.
Then you can safely try to set up a partition based emummc.
If it doesn't work, then just remove the parition, format the card and put all the file back.

Yea ended up doing exactly that. Wasnt difficult at all just took time to transfer things. I originally chose file based because i figured it was the easiest way to backup everything and it is, but i dont see anywhere or much documentation on it being the cause for pretty noticeable performance drops on games too. Could be my sd card speed possibly, dont know exact model off the top of my head but i know its a decent enough sandisk and all frame dip problems are eliminated moving to partition based 100 percent.