I've read gstaff and sometimes other bethesda employees peruse this forum so with that in mind I want to highlight something I haven't seen anyone mention yet.


I own skryim for the 360 and ps3. Both versions suffer from texture pop ups or I guess you could say pop ins. It seems to me the ps3 suffers from this more frequently than the xbox.


Its very annoying. I can be talking to a npc and during the conversation armor textures will finally appear. Approaching the npc I saw the armor. The armor has color but its a bland, smooth no detail color. Eventually the detail suddenly appears while he/she is talking and long after it should have appeared.


Trees do this too. Walking down a road a tree will suddenly appear a short distance away while other trees around it have been there all along. Shadows do it. Shadows will suddenly appear near me but the shadow should've appeared long before. I've seen doors do this alot. Running up to a door its bland and smooth. I usually have to wait a bit for the door detail to appear but I shouldn't have to wait at all.

All the above situations happen every time and very often during my ps3 play sessions.

As I was playing Skyrim, the one thing that was kinda "neat", but unnecessary was the models on the loading screen. I wouldn't
mind just watching the spinning logo if it meant that more processing power could be spent towards actually loading in the
textures of my game. Sometimes, if you pay attention, it has to load textures on the spinning model ON THE LOADING SCREEN.
That just blew me away.

Of course, I don't know how much time this would shave off- it's really just a guess if anything. As for objects like trees and buildings
in the open field- that's not necessarily texture pop ins if you're talking about the entire tree, that's draw distance. That's something
that has to be carefully tweaked to level out what tiny framerate the game can actually use. As for shadows, I'm not sure.

Yeah I've seen trees, whole trees, suddenly pop into view only a short distance away.

Just now while playing I entered a cave and the cave textures loaded all around me but only after I walked into the cave a bit and I turned around to see the door textures loading as I got closer to it.

The tree pop ups may be different from other texture pop ups.

Generally, in a video game, if the entire level does not load, there is a defined path around the player (generally a sphere) that is called Draw Distance.
This sphere acts kind of like a Fog of War to objects that aren't considered to be "landmarks" or bigger, more important pieces like cities or villages.
Usually, there are mutliple draw distances- like on the PC. Under it's settings it has different distances to render fog, water, trees, buildings, npcs, etc.

What's not normal, however, is to be surrounded by trees and have one less than 2 feet just APPEAR in front of you. That's a pop-in. But don't confuse
this with textures, that is just the "skin" of the model.

I'm sure you may know most of this already, but just in case you didn't there's the information.