| Soundwave said: From where exactly? You do understand Switch 2 cartridges are significantly faster than Switch 1 cartridges so they will cost more. Just as SD Express Cards cost more than regular slower SD Cards. Same way you used to be able to buy a 4TB drive for dirt cheap on PS4 because it could use shit ass slow pre-SSD drives. You can't do that anymore, the speed costs money. Likely Nintendo is only ordering 64GB sizes because if they start doing other sizes you don't save any money, it may even cost more money for a bespoke size like 16GB or something because that won't be mass produced in enough quantity to likely get the same price. Likely at 64GB, it cuts back on production complexity so Nintendo can get the price possible price at that size. These things are not that simple. What is even the fucking point of using cartridges in this way anyhow (to just dump the data onto the internal storage)? Like you're not even using the cartridge at all ... at that point what freaking difference does it make whether the data you transfer into your internal storage is from a cartridge or the internet? It makes no damn difference. It's not even a time saver when you consider digital games can be pre-loaded before release or release at 12:01 or whatever so you can have them loaded and be able to play rather than that waiting until the next day for the store to open at 9 AM or for it to ship from Amazon. |
The cost of a 64GB Switch 2 Cart and the cost of a theoretical 64GB Switch 1 Cart should be roughly the same.
It's just a chunk of NAND (Macronix's XtraROM) with some EEEPROM for saving.
The memory controller is actually inside the console itself. (It's cheaper to include a memory controller in every console, rather than every cart as every cart would require an orders-of-magnitude more chips over the consoles life.)
The performance difference should be negligible/non-existent as the memory will transfer at the memory controllers speed which for the Switch 2 uses the eMMC 5.1 standard, which is capped at about 400MB/s. Sadly eMMC tends to lack a full duplex communication system, so it's not bi-directional with it's transfer rates, which I guess for non-writable media like a cart... Is a non issue.
However eMMC is much lower in IOPS, which is where the real bottleneck likely comes into play.
As for the cart sizes issue... Remember Switch 2 64GB carts are backwards compatible and forwards compatible between the Switch 1 and Switch 2, which is why we can use a Switch 2 cart of Breath of the Wild in the Switch 1 console... It's speed will drop down from 400MB/s to around 90MB/s. - It's just a chunk of NAND memory, the memory controller inside the console determines the negotiated speed.
The only thing that prevents a 64GB cart ever running on a Switch 1 console is a software lockout by a developer.
Just like there is nothing preventing a 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or 32GB cart running on a Switch 2. It's just a software lockout by a developer or policy restriction by Nintendo.
******
And for developers who proclaim that the transfer rates of a Switch cart is not sufficient... They can take the approach of using the cart as data storage and install the game to the internal drive, just like optical media has been doing for decades.
It would take just a couple of minutes for an install verses several hours for a download, for those who are on marginal internet connections, that could be a massive advantage for them.
Or... Create a swap file on the console to stream cart data to faster internal memory, you would only need a few gigabytes at a time.
Soundwave said:
Is this not essentially a glorified Game Key Card then? Like what is the point of this, you can't play the games off that card, so it's essentially a meaningless piece of plastic. Why would you want to pay even $5 for that versus 75 cents for a Game Key Card cost. That's not $1 anyway. If this is the supposed "great option", I can see why Nintendo just passed on this as its stupid. You would just create a problem where people would be asking "why can't I just run the game from the cartridge then? So this is just a fake cartridge then basically?". |
It allows you to install and run a game without an internet connection.
Nintendo's servers won't be online indefinitely. Game preservation is important to some people.
It's not like Game Key Card games are that much cheaper for the consumer anyway.
Soundwave said:
Is this not essentially a glorified Game Key Card then? Like what is the point of this, you can't play the games off that card, so it's essentially a meaningless piece of plastic. Why would you want to pay even $5 for that versus 75 cents for a Game Key Card cost. That's not $1 anyway. If this is the supposed "great option", I can see why Nintendo just passed on this as its stupid. You would just create a problem where people would be asking "why can't I just run the game from the cartridge then? So this is just a fake cartridge then basically?". |
Whilst true, I don't wish to modify my consoles to play retro games via ROM dumps.
Last edited by Pemalite - on 09 September 2025
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