What I don't get is that I've got an Oblivion save with literally hundreds of hours, with a TON more clutter/dead bodies littered around the world, and yet even with having to cache all that data for each cell, the game never slips into an unplayable frame rate the way Skyrim does after only a few days of play.

If poorly optimized memory caching is causing this, why is Oblivion so much more stable by comparison? Maybe Bethesda should have outsourced Skyrim to the same team that did the PS3 version of Oblivion...

In Oblivion the dead bodies and crap lying around is removed from the world for the most part. Well dead bodies are but dont know about items.

For example you can raid the same dungeon over and over again fighting new bandits but the dead ones have gone.

If only they just do this with Skyrim, if they wanted realism they could just leave the dead bodies their for longer than 3 game days (Oblivion's time to respawn enemies) rather than what they have done now... forever.

Another thing I noticed with Oblivion is that my saved data files with that never swell to anything close to the size of Skyrim's. What the hell?

Yeah mines at 9000 and is showing no sign of stopping.

It will never stop..

Simple, the issue is the gamebryo engine was never meant for use on a PS3 OS. The Xbox uses c#, the PC uses c# / C++... the PS3 however.. uses sony's own version of C. The problem being here is, by designing the game on the xbox it can be ported to the PC easily (code wise anyway) whereas the PS3 version needs chopping to peices to work with sony's restrictive code.

In this process, theyve created quite a few memory leaks as well as the caching issue we are seeing here. The game isnt clearing up after itself, a problem made worse by the sheer scale of information it is trying to keep in those save files. By not cleaning up its just eating through all the VRAM the PS3 OS will bother to assign it, which is generally a small % of your free HDD space.


Now with oblivion however, the port was done by a seperate company, a company who had programmed from scratch on the PS3, they knew how to make the code work, so instead of butchering the c# Gamebryo engine, they converted it over with a few extra drivers and ran it that way. It still had the memory leaks, but they were so small that noticing them took some significant time and effort ingame.

TLDR: Bethesda didn't care about the PS3 version, and sold you( and me) a broken game.

people wake up.....

We have here with an new engine to deal with (Creation Engine)...don't forget that....nothing to compare with oblivion......

New engine? Aren't you delusional...

The creation engine as Bethesda calls it is a modification of the Fallout 3 engine and nothing more.

I don't get it, I just hit the save file lag bug, but apart from that, my PS3 copy has been running like silk, great framerate around 35-45 I'd say, quick menus and everything.

If you just hit it, then of course you wouldn't get it. When I first hit it, it would only lag after about 5 hours of playing.

Then 3 hours.

Then 2 hours.

Then about an hour.

Now it's unplayable.

So... 4J Studios, who Oblivion for the PS3 was outsourced to, successfully converted the engine and all Oblivion's assets for the PS3 back in 2006/2007 at the very beginning of the PS3's life cycle... and Bethesda couldn't be bothered to do the same for a game meant to be released years later when most other developers are doing just fine programming for the PS3?

Lying is cheaper.