Hardware How important is 4k random to loading speed for games.

[masterz87]

As the title says how important is the 4k random speed to the loading times for 3ds games? I know that the 4k write will matter when it comes to saving the games but how important is this for the games themselves on my n3ds?

P.S.
I just replaced my old uSD card in my dstwo with the samsung EVO sd card and game saves are way better and load times seem to be shortened some. Pokemon games save in literally 1s instead of the old 5-6s(if I remember right)
Here's the sd card in my nearly 9yr old laptop in the sd card port which I'm 110% sure doesn't have UHS-1 bus speed support.

 Random Read  4KiB  Q1,T1  6.778 MB/s [   1654.8 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB  Q1,T1  2.187 MB/s [    533.9 IOPS]

P.P.S.
the uSD card I have in my n3ds right now has a 4kQ1T1 random read of ~5MB/s and a write speed of ~1MB/s that's with a UHS-1 enabled usb-3.0 adapter so I imagine that the speed in a standard sd card slot will be much lower.

 

[FAST6191]

Save speed might be more a function of fragmentation or file system size but a speed bump is not unsurprising.

Game wise 3ds cards are not so speed sensitive (relatively speaking) as the DS, certainly not the GBA. Certain games (not sure offhand what they might be) might have things that respond well to fast reads, and the nature of games means there will be a lot of random reads in general (compared to say loading videos which is a fairly sequential affair). I have not heard of any games responding seriously negatively to speed/latency issues like we saw with Castlevania Portrait of Ruin on the DS (which was more like bad coding exacerbated by flash carts, which in turn made patches to sort the bad coding), and neither have I seen much like we saw for various DMA routines with the acekard custom firmware (AKAIO and such) family, or the removal of anti piracy checks on various DS games.

Don't think I have ever seen anybody do proper bus speed tests for the 3ds, much less try to constrain them to "normal" conditions rather than ideal ones for some test*, so I don't know if you will have saturated things or been near to it.

*all those nice music demos for the NES or something tend to do things like use all the CPU to improve capabilities, which obviously means nothing left for graphics and gameplay. Many speed tests ignore the realities of running games and thus give somewhat misleading numbers.

In the end though I don't think we will be pointing people at fast cards as much as encouraging them to get a decent one as big as they can sensibly manage. There might be some very old low speed SDHC of enough capacity to do it justice that would be less than ideal but as I would probably struggle to find anything other than class 10 new in shops these days, and such things costing next to nothing it is only the "found it in an old phone" set we need to worry about there.

 

[masterz87]

I never heard of portrait of ruin being so bad but then again I wasn't big into metroidvania games when I first got my DSTwo, I didn't imagine that it'd make _much_ difference when it came to load speeds as long as it's doing at least ~6MB/s read and 1MB/s in 4K randoms at least as that's what's required by android to use the uSD card as expanded internal storage so that apps don't suffer from performance issues. I also believe(or believed) that the o3ds didn't even have a class 10 slot at least that's what people said way back when which is something I still find odd as the 3ds cart is able to do ~16MB/s sequential transfers.