Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@FaeKnight You would think Nintendo would actually bring attention to the fact that it takes advantage of high speed cards rather than letting people buy cheap garbage cards and letting Switch look like it's so slow it's almost broken? To be fair, Samsung's control of the whole SD market has distorted what any of the versions mean. Then there's UHS-II that has TWO sets of pins. Switch may or may not have the second set to support the speed, but it says it supports 2TB cards, so presumably it does. Playing games is fine from U1, but downloading games apparently sucks on U1.

But it was telling to me that, while the horrible Hori Switch branded cards are U1, Hori knows nothing of memory they're a peripheral company. But Sandisk has Switch branded cards, and they are the U3 like their Extreme line rather than U1 like their Ultra line. Given they would cheap out anywhere possible for a Switch branded product it told me something they went with their more premium parts rather than mainstream parts. Sadly downloads on Switch will peg sustained writes like 4k video recording, and in terms of SD speeds, write speed is what you pay the big bucks for.

(Note that Sandisk (now Western Digital) is slimy where their specs page shows read speeds and simply has an asterisk saying "write speeds are slower". What they dont tell you is to look at the U rating standards board. The "100mb/s transfer" (read) cards really mean, for U1, 10mb/s write speeds. )

@FaeKnight That's chapter three. Pirate girls in miniskirts riding on rockets are always chapter 1.

@NEStalgia I'm not a fan of the combat in Tales games, but I'm counting on this one having good enough plot/characters to keep me engaged.

Time travel plots are easy to mess up because the writers don't often think through the extended implications of messing with time. Or you get scenarios where someone travels far back into the past and is able to talk with the ancient peoples on an even footing. It's that inherent conceptual messiness that bugs me, and Chrono Trigger doesn't really think through these issues enough for my taste.

@Ralizah
Whoa that image is way too big! Removed

It's a freaking anime. Suspension of disbelief is kind of required. It's not a study in quantum time mechanics.

I'm now pricing a new U3 micro sd card, now that I know there is a difference and that U1 creates a huge bottleneck. Not to mention I need more space if I want to keep buying digital games

Not sure what I'll do with the old card once I replace it. Maybe move it to my tablet, I don't know.

Weird, are these U3 improvements recent? I remember something like anything above U1 being pointless for Switch last year because the console didn't take advantage of the extra speed.

Donno, maybe with one of the more recent Updates? I hadn't even known there was a difference other size.

@Ralizah We'll try the image again:

(NL really needs to scale posted images so people don't clutter the whole board like I just did )

@Grumblevolcano I think that was one of those "people ran away with partially understood rumors and repeating what Youtubers told them and Nintendo never stepped in to say 'hey, we recommend x so your machine doesn't perform like a Commodore64!'" cases.

And I imagine DigitalFoundry has a lot to do with that back at launch. I believe what everyone meant was "U1 supports reads between 60-90Mb/s and Switch can't maximize that, so your game load times will be basically identical either way". DF's tests focused on loading. Almost nobody tested write performance. I actually had never even considered it myself until I got my X1 and noticed 250Mb/s+ downloads to my HHDD and like 30Mb/s downloads when I wrote to my bulk USB powered laptop drive. Eventually I worked out that the HDD was the bottleneck.

The problem is SD is not symmetric. If Switch has an i/o bandwidth of 60-90Mb/s that's great, but your card that reads at 90Mb/s, if it's U1, only writes at 10Mb/s sustained, and lets face it, those ratings are "generously optimistic. At times it probably drops to 7 or stalls.

Nintendo's FAQ says:
"High-speed microSD card guidelines:

UHS-I (Ultra High Speed Phase I) compatible
Transfer speed 60 - 95 MB/sec (the higher the transfer speed, the better gameplay experience on Nintendo Switch) "

Which is all fine and good. But both U1 and U3 are UHS-1 with "transfer" speeds of 60-95. Read speeds. And Nintendo for some odd reason is content making their eShop look bad by not mentioning write speeds for SD cards.

Worse, is the SD card companies. The current Samsung Select (Amz) says "Up to 100MB/s / 90MB/s read/write speeds respectively." Up to 100 for read is likely accurate for an A1. Up to 90MB/s is also likely accurate for write. In short bursts. Like taking a screenshot or a 30s video clip. But the whole point of the U rating is to rate the sustained write speed (such as recording video, or rapid burst photography, or....downloading 12GB of L.A. Noire.....) And that means a U3 shouldn't go below 30MB/s (acceptable for 4k recording at 30Hz. 60Hz really needs those Pro UHS-II cards that can push 100MB/s writes.) That's a far cry from 10MB/s guarantees of a U1.

If you're patient, I suppose bulk storage with slow write speeds works fine. Your game library loads equally fast, so all you need is the U1. If you're impatient, open a game, find out it has a mandatory install (or buy digital) waiting 2+ hours is a lot worse than 40 minutes. Plus it looks you you get a very tiny read speed boost as well (but still slower than internal storage, and the bigger the card, the slower, regardless....an annoyance of SD.)

My only concern now is that those Amazon house rebrand Evo Select cards, while U3, are the inferior models that hover closer to the minimum more than giving maximum, but at worst I still get a 3x speed bump.) Many people say they're identical to the Evo Plus but....many people say U1 is all Switch can use, too. (As though 10mbs is the best the console can do.) For $28 less than the current sale price of the Evo Plus, I'll try it.

Just did a test run with the smartphone voice chat app at Mario Kart, and wow... I'm actually slightly getting convinced by the app.

Still think voice chat should be native on the system though. But the smartphone works alright and I had a good laugh shooting the **** with people.

@EvilLucario At the end of the day, the app I think is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Sure, VC could be implemented into the system, but if the phone app works, it works.

I'm slightly baffled that Nintendo now allows VC with randoms in most games other than Splatoon 2, though. And if Nintendo is allowing VC with randoms now, then it would make more sense to include an online full party mode in modern Mario Party games (including Super Mario Party).

Once I subscribe to the service (if i do so now, Lord knows I'll be never get any schoolwork done since I'll want to test everything out), i'll be sure to check the VC out for myself.

The app appears to work okay for me too, now that you don't have to jump through hoops in-game and in the app to get voice chat going. Just got done with a rousing 2 player game of Mario Bros where me and the other person were using the app for voice chat. My biggest complaint about it now is it's limited compatability with games, and the fact it drains the battery of your phone something fierce since sleep mode appears to end voice chat.

I did ask on the 3DS recommendations thread about a 3DS port of Battle Cats, but I doubt anyone will see it...But after trying a search again, not only did I see that it wasn't really worth it, but I also saw that a Switch version is happening that seems to be quite different from the original mobile game.

Guess I'll keep an eye on that for now, will be out in Japan this December. Hopefully this one will be worth it, because I'm enjoying the mobile game, only thing I hate is the stupid energy bar and everything else that you see in free to play games. lol

Dude, stop with the backhand comments of some of the best rpgs in history. Why did you have to draw yet another great rpg into this lol.

@Spoony_Tech I'm beginning to think @ralizah just hates RPGs. And anatomically ergonomic controllers.

@Joeynator3000 I just looked up battle cats. Wtf did i just witness?

@EvilLucario How does the voice chat work on app?

@Azooooz It's fine. But since it's a phone and most people are not going to use dedicated microphones (like I do on Discord), the quality is as good as normal phone calls and there can be some echo from other people playing the game.

Also when you enter a room for Mario Kart or Mario Tennis (at least for the games I have), you get a notification on your phone (if you have it open) if you want to enter voice chat. Tap it, go inside the room. You also get notifications if people also join in at the top-left.

Of course, most people are ignoring the app so the chat lobby is likely to be empty of anyone but yourself.

@FaeKnight Only on Mario Tennis. I couldn't get chat going for that game at all. But for both times I tried Mario Kart, it was always available and surprisingly enough no one were jerks.