This is something I've always wondered, and I thought I'd ask since SoJ is coming up. There are different types and speeds of SD cards, and I believe the one I have is the 4gb SD card that came bundled with the 3DS (or the 3DS XL - I owned both and just used the larger card in my XL) [I don't have my 3DS handy so I can't actually read it]. I think it's a "normal" card that isn't the fastest but isn't bad quality.

One thing I noticed in DD is that when opening up the court record while the 3D models are onscreen, the court records is slower/lags a bit compared to when you open the court record when a 2D image (like an evidence photo) is displayed onscreen. I think the game slows down a little bit when lots of 3D models are moving around onscreen as well. I'm trying to figure out if this is an issue with the game itself (ex. VS has periods when the game lags like crazy, much more than DD, and that's on a physical cartridge) or if buying a faster SD card would make the game run at a 100% consistent frame rate.

So have all of you experienced this small lag, or do those of you with faster cards not have this issue? It actually doesn't bother me at all and I probably wouldn't even bother buying a new SD card because of it, I was just curious.

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No, in short it doesn't. Everything you see once the court opens is already loaded. The SD card mostly just affects loading time and asset streaming.

DD also has an unlocked framerate, meaning it can range from anywhere between 15fps to 60, which is why it speeds up every time there is a 2D image on the screen and slows down when there's many characters on the screen.

It means, every time you see the loading icon a slower SD card may take a longer time to load, but thankfully because of the way the game has been optimized it's rarely an issue even on slow SD cards. One thing that may be prevalent from the fact that this is a capcom game running on their MX framework engine is how saving can take very long on slower SD cards because of the write speed. Particularly in MH3U saving would take over a minute until I swapped out the SD card I had.

Also, the DLC case in Dual Destinies hangs on transitions and loadings, even certain animations where it has a noticeable freeze or lag for a second or more. I think that is due to the nature of the DLC being an addon and the game has to load from its files I'm a way that is less optimized maybe. I'm not an expert but I do know a bit about how games are loaded by the hardware.

To improve the actual framerate which is slow at times, especially in 3D, play on New 3DS and use any homebrew CPU-enabler. For DD it meant I could play most of the game with 30fps and above. Particularly the court entrance sat at a very pleasant framerate after I enabled the cpu-boost. For SoJ the framerate is generally worse and capped at 30 and even with CPU boost it doesn't really help it enough for my liking. A lot of beautiful animations are restrained by the choppy framerates, unfortunately. At best it simulates the feel of 2D sprites that only have a small set of frames per animations.

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Thanks for the info! Glad to know I don't have to buy a new card before the game comes out.

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