Switch 2 Speculation

[Charlietus]

Hmm SD Express cards appear to be 2-3x the price of standard micro SD.

Claims transfer speeds of 800 MBps, which is 4-5X the transfer speeds of U10 cards.

What is the Switch2 doing to use that kind of IO?

Aside from faster loading, which is always nice, Switch 2 is going to run most multiplatform games, so they needed fast storage.

 

[LiveGamer]

Yeah, better textures and easier ports.
But game developers may opt to still use lower res textures to make the game fit inside the game cartridge.

I wonder if this Patent could be used. They mention it can be used to upscale Textures to save space on the storage medium.

I would guess it upscales the textures into RAM? Possibly taking advantage of the extra space there.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Hmm SD Express cards appear to be 2-3x the price of standard micro SD.

Claims transfer speeds of 800 MBps, which is 4-5X the transfer speeds of U10 cards.

What is the Switch2 doing to use that kind of IO?

Their peers have SSDs. They need to match that at a relative performance level. Of course, an internal SSD would do that, but I doubt Nintendo want their users faffing with migrating games from external to internal storage.

Personally I think a 2230 m2 would be better as faster and cheaper and still upgradeable.

 

[wco81]

If it's just game loading and game saves, then it doesn't seem to use storage enough for faster IO to matter as much.

If they're streaming textures or something, maybe it makes more sense?

If the slots are compatible with slower cards, most or many users will just use the cards they have or are cheaper to buy.

Presumably it won't degrade the experience too much beyond longer load times.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If they are getting ports form PS5XBS, the games are expecting 2GB/s transfer speeds and very low latency access. Streaming is standard practice now.

 

[Charlietus]

If they are getting ports form PS5XBS, the games are expecting 2GB/s transfer speeds and very low latency access. Streaming is standard practice now.

The low latency shouldn't be a problem, but are there any games that don't work well enough on 500 mb/s sata ssd's? 800mb/s sounds pretty good.

 

[Dominik D]

If it's just game loading and game saves, then it doesn't seem to use storage enough for faster IO to matter as much.

Games purchased from online store could be allowed to be installed on the memory card so it makes sense to have good IO performance.