Hey guys,

I watched the videos focusing on the frame rate issue and of course I have the same problem. Did anyone tried to discover when this happens? I did, and it was pretty obvious that I had slowdowns in situations when my HD was working (i.e. the PS3 was preloading area data etc.). Except for one time I got in a fight out of a sudden (in front of a cave) and thus was unable to monitor my PS3, the problem always seems to occur at the same time the preloading-mechanism is working. However, one can observe another type of slowdown e.g. while visiting the catacombs of a chapel in whiterun (some braziers holding fire), but I think the first type is the one taking the fun out of playing the game.
Additionally, with this in mind one can observe that in the recorded videos most of the players seem to have the same "preloading-stutter". It is quite easy to see them entering so far not loaded area resulting in slowdowns while taking the same way back (before entering another unloaded area) works fine.
Why do I mention this? Easy, this observation implicates that the developers didn't care that much about the differences between the 360 and ps3 (512MB RAM altogether vs. 256+256 PS3) and thus didn't optimize the preloading-routines for the PS3-Version. It is (more or less) a guess, but with more effort at least this problem could have been avoided with high probability (adjust the cell-size, prefetching structures, etc.).
Maybe some of you guys can confirm this? Is there anyone with an SSD in his PS3? If so, these slowdowns shouldn't be existing.

The second thing. Why Bethesda doesn't seem to care about us that much ... well, look at the sales (http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=skyrim&publisher=&console=&genre=&minSales=0&results=50&sort=Total):
PS3 sales ~ 24%
XBOX sales ~ 63%
PC sales ~ 12%

At this point I don't think the game will be patchable with little effort. To achieve a stable and enjoyable state the other parts of the engine (and not just the rendering pipeline and other graphics parts, although the AA should be exchanged as well) need to be optimized. But this need time and money.


(sorry for my English, I'm obviously not a native speaker)

Maybey if they turn off the v-sync the game runs smoother.
Personaly ill rather have some tearing and a smoother framerate (just like on 360, and yes, i also have played that version at a friend)
because the framerate always dips when the xbox 360 tears...

It would help. But if they consider this as a solution I hope they implement it as an option and not disable it for everyone.
I don't mind the few fps drops, most of the game runs pretty smooth for me. But screen tearing is so annoying and ugly to look at.
Wouldn't want to trade +2-3fps for tearing :/


Didn't notice any preloading-stutter or slowdowns so far. But I exchanged my stock HDD to a 500GB HDD. Maybe this helped.

And to the sales numbers in the opening post, they are only for the Americas not worldwide numbers and even if they were the same worldwide, 24% is still a high enough number for a developer to care about.

If it has a bigger cache or more rpm, then yes, this would help avoiding slowdowns. Nevertheless, if you travel slowly (i.e. don't run oder ride) then the slowdowns are very rare. Did you try to run (holding L2) or ride a horse at max speed? It would surprise me if you would not observe any slowdowns (of course through non preloaded area).
Optional AA (which is currently used) and vsync would definitely help improving the performance. If this would be still "good looking", well ... that's another topic.

Personally, I would prefer if they would optimize and fix their engine for the PS3 (which has nothing to do with quests etc.). Bugs in such a huge game aren't avoidable completely, but one should at least guarantee a bug-free engine!