games

When emulating games on an Android phone, I've noticed a few systems, like PS1 and PSP, suffering from intermittent stutters, usually when loading sound effects or music. On Duckstation you can see the FPS drop to half for about a second when this happens. I initially chalked this up to issues with the emulators themselves or my phone not being exactly top of the line, but then I thought about the nature of the stutters and began to wonder if the problems were caused by the ROMs being stored on an SD card.

I moved a game that had stuttering issues to the phone's internal storage and sure enough, the stutters were gone. Would getting a faster SD card help? Here are the card's stats:

• Speed Class: 10 (10 MB/s)
• UHS Speed Class: Class 1 (10MB/s)
• UHS Bus Speed: UHS-1 (Up to 104MB/s)

It isn't exactly top of the line either, being the cheapest one I could get for the size and quite old on top of that. On the other hand, I also came across posts where people were saying SD card read speeds on Android are just generally bad, especially on more recent versions were they are hampered by some kind of new file access system.