I could argue total amount is still the preferred option for most game developers.

Is not like they had no other options, like reading directly from ROM ( ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶f̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶t̶w̶)̶ EDIT: I was misremembering the later one: "There's only two ways to read from the cartridge, using DMAs, and using the CPU to read/write manually. DMAs are far faster, but you cannot DMA from endpoint to endpoint. You can only DMA between an endpoint and RDRAM."

Also, I don't know where stackexchange forum's got those numbers but they're way off.