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SvennoJ on 07 September 2017
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Pemalite said:
SvennoJ said:

How do you get to that conclusion. The article clearly states it maxes at UHS-1 speeds. That UHS-1 card they used has upto 80 MB/s read speed. And the game from cartridge loads slower than from an UHS-1 card. It's not useless but below 80 MB/s for sure. Too bad they didn't test slower cards to see how they hold up.

Anyway it's not the goroundbreaking difference with discs that people seem to assume when switching to cartridges. Lego city undercover still takes 51 seconds to load on Switch, compared to 1:04 on WiiU, yet much slower than on ps4 wich loads in about 30 seconds.

Just throwing out rough guestimates as we don't actually have any real-world transfer rate data on-hand, something that Digital Foundry hints at.
One thing to keep in mind is that the load times between Cart and the MicroSD is extremely minimal, within a possible margin of error.

And with the 16GB UHS-1 card having a max of 80MB/s... And the fact that Nintendo also has varying degrees of ROM capacities and potential speeds... Well you get the idea. 80-90MB/s is probably on the upper-end of cart transfer rates.
Carts with smaller ROM chips will probably get significantly less than that.

The fact that all the load times, internal, cart, different MIcroSDs are so minimal suggests that the game itself is the limiting factor. The 90 MB/s cart is even slower in some cases than the 80 MB/s cart. For all we know access speed could be limited to 30 MB/s or less and what we're seeing is the effect of different access times. Same with Lego city undecover, 51 seconds on Switch vs ~30 seconds on ps4 from HDD. Is it the read speed, or does the game do a lot of preparations while loading which the ps4 can perform much faster.

It's weird though that the WiiU version of botw loads faster after death and going in and out of shrines. Perhaps the internal storage of WiiU (3GB install for BotW) is faster than that of the Switch. http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/03/heres_why_speedrunners_prefer_the_wii_u_version_of_zelda_breath_of_the_wild

Anyway my point was that I'm not seeing any big advantages in load times between cartridges and optical discs (with install) Instantly ready to play is kind of a moot point too nowadays as the disc usually has installed enough to play before the day 1 patch has been downloaded.