Even so they told they made the game based on X360, the Pc version ends up with better draw distance no screen tearing, like X360, and better frame rates (not to mention the dev kits they are making available now for PC user create and share content for Skyrim). So technically even if is a port to PC the Port is better. Even the PS3 version is not a direct port, u can see in whiterun walls PS3 uses another texture design. So they built the game based on X360 architecture, but touched it for other versions as well, but as u said, PS3 architecture is not similar to PC/X360 so needed much more code work to take better advantage of the hardware and could even ended with better textures and without the lag problems. Like Square Enix did with FFXIII, they developed the game in a multiplatform engine but that engine was based on PS3 architecture so the PS3 version ended up with better visuals.
Everyone knows when a game is built in a PC/X360 architecture only the PS3 will suffer, but thats what separates the good developers from the bad developers. Infinity Ward developed Modern Warfare with 2 teams, one working in PS3 architecture and other in X360/PC architecture, result was a game u could not see differences between versions cuz they made sure the game looked exactly identical in both consoles.

morrowind for the xbox was released in what many, including myself, would say was an unplayable state. it had gamebreaking bugs that could literally stop the progress of a game entirely and require a restart. this was before patches so the game remains that way today. I don't think TES belongs on consoles in the first place, but I guess it's a little late for that.

if I were a PS3 owner, I would try to be patient. At least there is the possibility that your issues will be solved. Start new games and try not to interfere with anything in the world that isn't a treasure chest or something essential. For some reason a 100 hour playthrough at 6000KB in Oblivion has become a 15000KB savefile in Skyrim and until and unless they can fix that and other problems, there's not much you can do. It's not like you can roll-back patches or upgrade hardware. that's the problem with consoles, limited user options and customability.

This console generation has lasted 7 years. that's the longest cycle I can remember. It's just too long for a system that only has 256MB RAM max at any given time. If you had a computer with similar specs, it probably would have some troubles running as well. That's the consequence of the change in direction Microsoft/Sony took, releasing peripherals and extending their consoles lifecycles at the expense of performance and technology. Buggy games that are held back in every way because they belong exclusively on platforms that have the next-gen technology to drive them but they aren't because of the modern economic schematic.

I have some experience modding Elder Scrolls games on PC, so I may have a better understanding of Obsidian's commentary than others.

His words pretty much spell out exactly what is going wrong here, and I'm afraid some people aren't seeing that. Here's the summation.

Your save game continues to grow in size (or change size, either way) because of a constantly shifting collection of numbers that mark every single thing that makes your game different from somebody else's. This comes down to everything from where you've dropped a pot, whether you took hide bracers off a random bandit, an enchantment you added to a ring, and everything in between. If you changed something about a character or item, the game needs a way to remember that change for later, and stores it as a value in your save file. When you load your game, those values are distributed throughout the game world (the .esm, essentially) and overwrite the base values - recreating your version of the world.

The thing is, it ISN'T your save file that's the problem, but the save file's size IS an indicator of how many values must be loaded into the .esm as you move about the world. The more you change, the more you experience, the more likely it is that the game will chug as RAM is used up allocating these values.

As the developer mentions, there are also a large number of persistent references that must always be held in memory. The reason a guard is wary of your "honeyed words," how people in other cities recognize you as a Stormcloak, why assassins will chase you for completing a certain quest. These things, and many many more, are values that the world must be constantly "aware of" for it to be the consistent, reliable, and realistic place we all know and love. As the dev says, the number of persistent references is very taxing on memory - the more references you have, the less RAM is available to allow smooth gameplay. I'm guessing memory is re-allocated dynamically whenever the framerate drops, but eventually, the number of things the game needs to constantly "think" about gets to be too much. DLC only makes the problem worse (hence why Fallout 3: GOTY and F:NV really blew up on PS3).

So, why is the PS3 affected more than any other platform? As Obsidian says, it has to do with the way PS3 separates and distributes memory. In much the same way that PS3 can never have cross-game chat (because a certain amount of RAM is already split between games and XMB), the split memory architecture of the PS3 may be to blame. A shared pool of RAM can be accessed by GPU and CPU, so in some ways there's a constant balancing act. The more references and values that the CPU has to process and sort, the less RAM is avaiable for the graphics card from the shared pool. Hence, framerate drops, game chugs, and the like.

On a side note: All seven cores of the PS3's Cell Processor may be available for processing, but remember this: one core is reserved for the XMB. That means if a PSN friend logs in, or you've got background processes like downloads running, the XMB immediately demands use of one core and limits what's available to the game. This is my theory as to why turning off system notifications and other random XMB settings has boosted framerates a bit (there are threads about this buried in this subforum somewhere).

I personally believe that Bethesda does not deserve all of the blame that we're laying on them. I'm glad that this Obsidian dev made these comments, because they've allowed me to see that it's basically a problem with the Creation / Gamebryo engine not playing nice with PS3 hardware. It's happened before with other games and other engines. I would never expect Bethesda to completely fix this on a code level to adapt to the PS3's split memory architecture - such an endeavor would basically mean rewriting their entire engine, an endeavor that would be hugely expensive, massively time-consuming, and essentially useless given that Skyrim may very well be their last game on this generation of hardware. The current engine is incredibly efficient at what it does, but here's hoping for a rewrite and universal compatibility from here on out.

Bethesda knows about this, and always has. Obsidian knows, and always has. It's a balancing act that Oblivion and Fallout were able to handle after much iteration and optimizing. I'm not surprised Bethesda didn't hand out PS3 copies for early previews or reviews: they were probably in-office 24/7 working with references and optimizing the RAM balance in any way that they could before release. If I was a betting man, I'd wager that Skyrim has several times more indexed values and references than either of those games.

What do I want them to do? Continue optimizing to provide players the best possible experience and help balance out resources. Calculate NPC actions in a shorter radius. Use occlusion like the old Crash Bandicoot games so the GPU doesn't need as much RAM. Save less persistent references, or at least have them refresh and reset sooner. The whole scope of things Bethesda could do to optimize the experience is huge, and I'm optimistic for the future. I still hold them accountable for this release, and for not tightening things up before launch, but I'm more understanding of the situation and their plight thanks to Obsidian. Unfortunately, those massive save files that players managed to build up in the first couple weeks of release have a staggering number of references and indexed changes; the most dramatic improvements definitely won't be seen for those unfortunate players

Well if they knew about,why they haven't done anything about it?and if they did and it didn't work why they released a broken game on PS3?If they wanted to release it broken at least they shouldn't let a full price over it...Media either ways are still hunting them and they should keep doing that because this situation is unacceptable...

Brilliant post! +1

First on the topic, I've been thinking about the first post of this thread alot. In the last patch they killed the graphics in skyrim, in agreeing with the original post- the less memory you need for draw distance and textures the more you would have for all those dead bodies and items scattered about, makes sense. However, like I said before, I hate the graphics now, and although it's playable the framerate still stinks at times. I want those old graphics back, right now I think it looks worse than oblivion goty on ps3. I would honestly rather play with no patches and restart before I did the 7mb save file rather than play completely in the current state.

now a bit off topic, responding a bit to SolemnOaf - - I bought morrowind for the xbox, and I agree it was nearly unplayable.. freezing a bit when every cell loaded and eventually giving you a intro/loading screen that never ended. BUT then when I bought the 'goty' version years later it worked great, though oddly the graphics werent quite as good. Eventually the disk drive started to die on my xbox, after about 3-4 years.

Fast forward to oblivion on xbox360. I got my first red ring of death shortly after I gave up on playing oblivion because it would constantly freeze on me, and occasionally take several minutes to load. I remember checking the bethesda forums and reading about how you should 'clear your cache' to prevent neverending load screens. I never got anywhere with it, I sent my xbox360 in and got it fixed.. I eventually snapped the disk in half and threw it in the trash. And eventually my xbox360 ended up in the trash after the 3rd red ring of death.

Point of that story, don't buy an xbox to fix your ps3 problems.. if you can't stand it that much, build a PC and steel yourself for the endless intellegence checks as you try to solve the 100s of problems that arise, which are all fully fixable if you are smart enough of course. The first test being building the pc, dont buy a high priced dell, if you cant bravely build a PC you have little chance at troubleshooting pc problems. And yes I built my pc, but no I dont play it much as I have a medical condition that makes me never use a mouse/trackball + keyboard for more than 10 mins.

More on my gushing xbox story and elder scrolls history, just because no one is still reading my post at this point (and you probably shouldnt read beyond here honestly ), im a hardcoe console gamer since atari2600 really. I've bought xbox morrowind + xbox morrowind goty, pc morrowind + pc morrowind goty, PC oblivion (played with a mod program called 'oldblivion' that literally made it look worse than nintendo64 cuz my pc couldnt run it at the time with a radeon 8500 le card), xbox360 oblvion, xbox360 goty oblivion, pc goty oblvion (my son started playing this, it never worked right with a controller), ps3 goty oblivion (my xbox360 died for the 3rd time and i trashed it), and got my son pc skyrim for christmas.. which I couldnt stand it.. we opened it around thanksgiving and he currently plays the hell out of it although it only works in 'windows98 compatibility mode', at the age of 10 with much advlt supervision (no killing innocents! ) and several console command tweaks to make it doable for his age group. After 3 hours of playing skyrim on pc with him on a friday night (you all know the first 30mins of skyrim is unbelievably, insanely awesome) I got up at 6am the next morning to go get ps3 skyrim which used to be on my xmas list. the end.

Ya know the wii-U is going to have like 1gig of video ram and a quad core processor, going to play their port of skyrim, the witcher2, mass effect3, and diablo3 like a champ lol

the more i read this thread the more i feel cheated, the less i feel they'll be able to fix it

thx 4 the info guys

Wow Bethesda, I can't believe you...

There are two kinds of "doing something about it". There's optimizing the situation with everything from less references stored, turning off V-SYNC, etc. to work around the PS3's split memory architecture. The other kind is creating a completely different engine - years of development and millions of dollars - for which there is no guarantee other bugs or problems wouldn't spring up. A brand new engine is a much greater entity than many people realize, and Bethesda knows how to work gameplay magic with what they've already got. Much of the randomness, Murphy's Law moments, and unpredictability that we all love about The Elder Scrolls is because the current engine allows for it (I've seen how it works on a code level).

You can't recreate Skyrim with a different engine and expect the exact same experience that just runs better. It would be a fundamentally different game. Suddenly, the game runs at 30 fps constantly, but at what cost? Whose to say the experience feels familiar, or is enjoyable? Maybe it's not even fun anymore.

My point is, the programming that Bethesa uses to tie the worlds of Morrowind, Cyrodiil, the Capital Wastes, and Skyrim together is an excellent system that doesn't play nice with the way the PS3 splits its memory. Bethesda released the best product they could in the time given to themselves, knowing full well they would have a long road of patches and optimizing ahead of them. I don't fault them for doing their best. Their PR svcks, their communication with fans and consumers svcks, and I would have loved a game that runs at 30 fps constantly.

It's not the PS3's fault - the splitting of its memory allows for fantastic game experiences using very specific programming (see: Uncharted). It's not Betheda's fault - their engine works wonders but depends on a certain amount of available memory. In the end, the situation just svcks. If you're currently dealing with unplayable lag, I wish you the best. Optimizations and fixes are coming, but if your save file is already gargantuan, there's only so much that changes can do for you with all the values and references the game has indexed for you. For others, their save files were manageable size (4-8) prior to the most recent patch, and further patches will be more noticeable for them. For those starting a new game, enjoy the experience - the current state of the game, and Bethesda's plans for updates, will give you an incredible experience for a very long time to come.

No, think about it, this makes no sense.
The PS3 has separated memory for graphics and system than can't be used interchangeably. While your solution would have worked on the Xbox (dumbing down the graphics to have more memory for references for the system engine) it doesn't on the PS3. You would just have unused graphics memory that can't be used by the system engine for references because they are not interchangeable.

I think the quick and dirty hack that Bethesda did to reduce lag in the 1.2 patch: To remove a lot of intractable objects to reduce references that have to be store. e.g. a lot of objects (food etc) in Dragonreach have disappeared.

In short: If what the developer said is the indeed the problem, then reducing the graphics will never be a solution to fix the lag problem on the PS3.

I wonder if Sony could do some kind of firmware update to make the RAM unified rather than divided?

No. It's a hardware decision. Two different RAM types.

I installed and started the game after the second patch was released and I'm currently at 50 hours gametime, and 4mb save size, so I don't know if that's typical behaviour or shows that the patch was barely a band-aid at all. Bearing in mind I've only cleared 7 dungeons and visited two major cities, Whiterun and Markarth.

Either way I'm going to stop playing until this next patch is released, to see how it goes...

Weaksauce!
Well, I have been thinking about it for a while, but it looks like it's time. I will be selling my PS3 and buying a 360 soon. I love epic games like this and the PS3 is obviously incapable of running them. Not to mention previous issues with the network security. Goodbye Sony.

Skyrim is doing crazy things to people, it's making them buy SSD drives and throw their PS3s away!

What other game has the PS3 failed to play properly? I've played all the big sandboxy ones and it hasnt struggled at all. Not once. Stop blaming the system, it's the game that's at fault here, or more specifically it's the developers decisions that led to this debacle.

Maybe I should have been more elaborate. Sony made this decision for a reason. They used a expensive (faster) RAM chip for graphics that helps in a lot of situations.

My save file is still relatively small as I've only played for a few days, but I'm extremely disappointed to find out what's lurking ahead for me. Such a phenomenal game up to this point and I'm dreading the lag.

Would a dispose corpse and dropped item option truly lessen file size and lag? Why wouldn't this be done? Why wouldn't seemingly simple things like this be fixed? And I underestimating the length of time and difficulty it'd take for such fixes?

See my previous post. It's not the game, or the system. It's the way the engine interacts with the hardware, or rather, the way the hardware and the engine are fundamentally conflicted.

yeah yeah... but can be it fixed?

In truth, it WOULD lessen both file size and lag, but to what extent we don't know. I'm guessing that the persistent references Obsidian mentioned are what use up the bulk of the ram, while the indexed values rack up over time.

Knowing what I know about the way such options "dispose of corpse" etc. are included in the game's engine / modding kit, they wouldn't be hard things to implement. However, the necessary balancing tweaks might be. For example, you'd need to disable the "Dispose of Corpse" option for essential bodies or bodies that are holding quest items, which would require establishing a separate flag for those characters, and that flag would need to be able to be turned on and off (if you take the quest item out, they should now be disposable). Furthermore, some gameplay elements depend on corpses - Raise Undead, etc. The chain of things to tweak in order to make it all work goes on and on and on.

Morrowind had this kind of faux "freedom", but I don't think I've played a game that was as easy to exploit.

Right, so like I said, it's the developer's decisions that led to this debacle. They have uni degrees, they have experience, they're not stupid, they released the game on PS3 knowing the headaches it would cause later down the line, and maybe they didn't know just how big those headaches would be, but they knew enough, and ultimately they went ahead anyway, because they couldn't throw away revenue.

Maybe there were dissenting voices, voices of reason, but the voices weren't loud enough, and so here we are with a faulty product. The games industry is obviously not mature yet, in any other industry a company that released a faulty product that degrades unexpectedly with further usage like this would be taken to account, but hey, it's just videogames we're talking about here, it's fine. As long as there aren't hokers being killed in GTA, then there's nothing to see here!

I don't like seeing the PS3 blamed so easily and discarded for Xbox for just one game, it's ridiculous. The PS3 handles games fine, it can't handle Bethesda though, not because it's inferior, but because of the decisions made at Bethesda HQ.

Unfortunately, the almighty dollar is always the bottom line. Here's hoping for optimizations and updates to make better use of the RAM available to them. It's a shame to see such an amazing game be unplayable for some because the engine and hardware don't mesh well together.

Well he mentions that it could be changed but would require alot of resources basically- excuse for obsidian is that it isn't their engine and they hadn't had it for very long as I see it theres NO EXCUSE FOR SKYRIM AS IT's SUPPOSED TO BE A NEW ENGINE.... it's not acceptable that Bethesda didn't fix this whilst developing the 'new' engine I really want to play skyrim but it's starting to lag again and I think it's ridiculous that something I paid money for is effectively unplayable also this is what I suspected the problem was at least we know now.

By reading what J Spot wrote. It looks like the devs are lazy. Think about it for a moment. What if they made all the dead bodies Items laying on ground reset after 24hr in game time? Would be alot less for the game to remember. Even if they have to set chests and stuff like that to reset im sure most ps3 gamers would not care. Reset Dungeons and object you might of accidently moved as well. Worst case Reset the game completely Except for your quest log and Your hero your wife and your home. Every 24 hours in game time. Safe to say it would more then likely drasticly cut your game save files down. Probably cut it down more then 50%. And it all changes that ps3 users would gladly accept if it means being able to play the game.

I would LOVE to see how Pete responds to this.