How Fast Are Vita Memory Cards?

March 2nd, 2012, 01:45 Posted By: wraggster

PlayStation Vita has swiftly established itself as the premier platform for the most technologically advanced mobile games, boasting a simply superb hardware spec, a beautiful screen and an excellent array of input controls. The only thing that disappoints is Sony's historical annoyance in insisting upon proprietary memory cards in an environment where almost everyone else seems to get by just fine using SD cards and their micro equivalents. This article asks if they are needed, and whether the big price premium translates into a better experience for the gamer.Sony says that the cards are required for security concerns (an odd excuse for a system that lets you back up all content to PC or Mac, and not a good enough reason to shift the cost onto the consumer) and also says that a set performance level is required. Bearing in mind how many games stream in assets while you play, this second reason makes a lot more sense. At Digital Foundry, what we wanted to know was how fast these proprietary cards are, how they compare to what's already on the market, and to discover what the performance level is that Sony deems appropriate to justify a proprietary set-up.It's fair to say we didn't go into this in a particularly optimistic frame of mind: when it takes 9.5 minutes to back up WipEout 2048 from Vita to PC (a game with a download size of 1.6GB, suggesting a paltry 2.87MB/s transfer speed), we aren't particularly optimistic about performance here, but we wanted hard numbers across a range of scenarios.A good test is sequential read and write speed. We tried to measure this by using a 425MB 720p video file in the h.264 format, implementing the Content Manager to stream the file from computer to Vita and back again, repeating the test three times. We asked four users - two using the 8GB card and two 16GB owners - to help us out here to give a range of results.First up, a look at read performance - probably the most important element for games.

"When it takes 9.5 minutes to back up the 1.6GB WipEout 2048 to your PC, it's safe to say that we didn't go into these tests with much optimism."

	8GB Card 1	8GB Card 2	16GB Card 1	16GB Card 2
Read Test 1	6.44MB/s	6.16MB/s	7.20MB/s	7.46MB/s
Read Test 2	6.34MB/s	6.54MB/s	7.33MB/s	7.46MB/s
Read Test 3	6.25MB/s	6.44MB/s	7.33MB/s	7.87MB/s
Average	6.34MB/s	6.38MB/s	7.29MB/s	7.60MB/s

Read speeds are hardly colossal for flash media, bearing in mind that even a cheapo USB flash drive should be able to provide a 10MB/s throughput, and a carefully chosen bargain stick such as the ByteStor Data Ferry can achieve over 15MB/s with ease. Class 10 microSDs can easily outstrip the read speeds here too and are a quarter of the price of the Vita cards. In terms of other comparisons, the PS3's Blu-ray drive can achieve a maximum throughput of about 8MB/s, so the Vita gets close with the 16GB card but falls short on the 8GB variants we tested.Now onto the write speeds, where things take a turn for the bizarre, and where performance falls through the floor. What we should emphasise here is that all runs were consecutive with no breaks and the data clearly indicates that caching isn't going on - as results can get worse on later runs, rather than better. What we'll also point out is that this is one single file being transferred. Transferring scores of photos across to the Vita sees performance fall still further - dramatically so in fact, which may explain why WipEout and other titles take so long to back up onto your PC.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df...a-memory-cards

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