Micro SD is an order of magnitude slower than the NVMe option, though.

I am not sure I can tell the difference between games that load from my SSD versus my NVMe. Is there real benefit?

So, this is actually something that is in flux right now, and the tech is shifting towards loading from storage directly into memory, like the cartridge days back in the 1990s (Nintendo 64, etc). This is in flux to the point that it's really the new games from the past year or two you'd want to test.

What caused this shift is that the current generation of consoles shipped with SSDs. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S both shipped with NVMe storage standard. Games going forward are designed with this baseline in mind.

The reason this affects game technology is because it changes the tradeoffs. You always wanted assets to load quickly, since forever. The amount of time it takes to load an asset has two parts that contribute: I/O time and the CPU time spent decompressing.

In the past, storage was more precious and slow, so your game would load much faster by compressing the data. NVMe users would never see worse loading times than SSD or HD users, so you'd just compress everything, and the NVMe users would see a slight benefit.

Now that NVMe is a reasonable minimum requirement, you can ship a game that uses uncompressed data on disk. People with NVMe see faster load times, and people without them see slower loading times, possibly MUCH slower.

When I say "uncompressed", I just mean "uncompressed, relative to the runtime representation" which may still use compression, like ASTC.

The situation with the Nintendo 64 is remarkably similar to what's going on now... because the Nintendo 64 had such a fast storage system, games could "easily" load assets on the fly. The system had only 4MB of RAM, which seemed like a very severe limitation, but you could make very expansive areas in games by streaming assets from the cartridge while playing. It was fast enough that you could load some assets from the cartridge into RAM, and they would be available to render during the same frame! These are the kind of technological changes that are going to happen inside engines, now that NVMe storage is more common.

I put "easily" in quotes because nothing about Nintendo 64 programming is easy.

No, there is not. Loading times from SATA SSD and NVMe SSD is basically the same. Look for example at https://www.techspot.com/review/2116-storage-speed-game-load... - In all loading time benchmarks there is a huge spike for the HDD, and then a minimal difference of ~1 second or less between the slowest SATA SSD and the the fastest NVMe SSD. Note that this includes PCI-E 4.0 SSDs.

Sure, might change in the future, but no game right now uses the future APIs (direct storage) that might lead to bigger differences. Which is no surprise, as Windows 10 does not support it.

SD class UHS-I is about as fast as a SATA HDD, so it will be quite a bit slower than your SATA SSD.

> SD class UHS-I is about as fast as a SATA HDD

As fast for sequential data, but at least an order of magnitude more IOPS.

Because SATA and NVMe are both extremely fast compared to SD cards.

Just take a look at the painfully long loading times on the Switch to see the difference.

Is SATA fast compared to an SD card these days? Recently, when I've worked with newer SD cards (UHS-I and faster) I've been quite impressed with the speed in practice... and I've been hitting fsync at the end, so it's not just the speed of the cache. It no longer feels like I'm working with removable storage.

UHS-III works with Micro SD cards and it's supposed to give you 624 MB/s. SATA 3.0 is supposed to give 6.0 Gbit/s, or 750 MB/s.

That's only 20% faster. I'm sure the real number is different due to overhead, but how different can it be?

I'm not going to be shocked by low Switch performance, since the Switch is basically an obsolete mid-range phone, in terms of specs.