Obviously many of us PS3 players have encountered frame rate issues -- some immediately, and some after save files become sufficiently large. I have little to no knowledge of the technology issues that cause this sort of problem, so for those of you who understand these things, I have a question:

Is this lag issue something that a patch can fix, or are some PS3 systems simply too underpowered to play this game?

I have the newest PS3 if that makes any difference and man the LAG is horrible! Its almost non-playable... and not to mention with broken quests and not being able to finish them... I'm losing faith in this game fast...

Underpowered? The PS3 is not underpowered and its power is not the cause of this issue... period. It can be fixed, but the question is how deeply rooted is the problem and is it viable or even likely Bethesda would fix it even if were viable? The problem lies with the game code.

If it truly has to do with disk read speed (as in the HDD, as the solution thread that suggests getting a solid state hard drive indicates), then it may not be fixable by any patch. You would need to buy Skyrim on another platform to get a playable experience past 50 hours.

That's ridiculous. the PS3's HDD is no slower than the 360's disc read speed or the 360's HDD speed and the 360 isn't having these problems. Oblivion didn't have these problems. The problem is not with the hardware.

If it's read speed problems (which I think it is judging from the problem descriptions on the forums) then unless you upgrade the hard drive you basically have two options: reducing the quality of the textures (allowing for smaller files to be loaded) or reducing the view distance (allowing less files to be loaded for normal operation).

Option one [censored]s up the polish and option 2 [censored]s up the immersion, so I doubt either will be a viable repair strategy that is actually considered by Bethesda. My septims are on a more optimized engine that don't load as many textures that are obstructed by objects in the game worlds and therefore don't need to be drawn out or other stuffs. I'm just making semi-educated guessing here but that kind of optimizations seem to be the only thing that might sort the issues out through the software side.

EDIT: Basing my assumptions on the fact that when I had my FPS issues, standing still and letting the PS3 "think" (load) for a while made the close surroundings roll on just fine until you ran off a bit toward new adventures. Then it started stuttering again until that area had been given some time to form properly. This is most obvious when fast travelling. Typical to this is also "low detail textures" that get replaced with their proper high detail once after a while, since they act as a sort of placeholder to display something while the proper stuff is loading.

It can be fixed. There is another post somewhere in here (buried under all the flaming) explaining the difference between the code which microsoft uses and the one sony uses. I think the conclusion was that skyrim had not been translated properly into sony's language. I dont know the technical side of it tbh, but i had a memory leak issue (which is probably what this is) with football manager 2011 on the pc and that got fixed by a patch, so i would think, yes. We will probably have to start over again though.
This game is completely amazing though so i dont mind that one bit!

Bethesda seriously wouldnt release this game if it was beyond remedy, it will be fixed very shortly i think.

It's not ridiculous at all.

Consider that the PS3 game has to access the HDD more than the 360 version. The 360's DVD drive has a much faster read speed than the 2X Bluray drive in the PS3 (the slow optical drive is why PS3 games have mandatory installs in the first place). This means that the PS3 game is hitting the hard drive more frequently for larger chunks of data. Even if the drives are the same speed, it's more stress on the PS3's HDD than the 360's.

If installing a faster HDD on the PS3 legitimately fixes the problem (as some on the forum have reported), then that would be further evidence. I'm not saying it will be "impossible" to fix (I hope not!), but it could be extremely difficult to do without sacrificing other aspects of the game, and who knows if Bethesda will deem it worth the effort.

I am 99.9% sure that it can be fixed with a patch.

I am also 99.9% sure that it won't be fixed with a patch.

At least not the first patch. Maybe after we have all got fed up and sold our copies it will be fixed.

The 360, by default, runs EVERYTHING off of the disc and the PS3's HDD speed is, if anything in comparison, at least as fast if not faster than the 360's optical drive read speed. The 360 version is not having these problems.

The fault that lies with the lag is that the RAM is having to take up all the memory remember where everything is, that's why the lag gets worse as the file size grows bigger. Maybe the could code the game to re-focus the ram more towards game performance, i don't know how it would work.

More i think of it... The evidence points to memory leak.. Game running slower as the game progressess means the ps3 is having to use virtual ram (HDD-space) after it depletes the dedicated ram (which shouldnt happen). The HDD isnt anywhere near the regular ram when it comes to speed and that is why it slows the game down. This will be recoded via patch but we might have to start over.

Point is: It is fixable so no need to panic, buy new hdd's, put your houses on fire or mention Bethesda in your suicide notes..

Screw having to re-start over

This is what I know so far, take it with a grain of salt...

The issue is definitively software related which means it can be fixed. From what I have read on other forums, Sony has their own proprietary language that all games for PS3 have to be written in. Windows and Xbox both use C# and that is what the Skyrim game engine was written in. The game engine was developed by a third party, not Bethesda. When it got translated to Sony's programming language, something must have gone awry and now we have something in the engine that is not handling memory correctly. It may be one thing, it may be many put together.

This is the third game Bethesda has released that uses this same language and this issue has been known to them for some time. Speculating here, but this leads me to believe that the issue is not just one thing but may require quite a substantial engine re-write in order to fix, which may take some time.

Speculation aside, in the end it comes down to how much of the engine has to be re-written in order to make the game work and if that is economically viable. Seeing as this is Bethesda's biggest release, it would seem quite a logical and good business move for them to fix this ASAP or they might as well go PC/xbox exclusive.

This would make sense. I wonder how many people would be willing to give up every little cup and pot and piece of bread being "remembered" so that it's in the same place when you com back to it, in trade for a more stable gaming experience..

You're talking about the Gamebryo engine. Which, I find funny if they used it again seeing as one of their huge PR talking points for Skyrim was that they rebuilt the game engine themselves, from scratch, dubbed the Creation engine. Am I the only one who remembers this?

Right, they called it the Creation engine. Guess what programmers are... lazy. More likely than not a huge chunk of the Creation Engine is copied and pasted from Gamebryo. Just something may have been overlooked.

Again, grains of salt... take them.

Funny thing, Oblivion used the Gamebryo engine and it ran perfectly on the Ps3, yet another company ported it.

Yes, it can be fixed by a patch. Age of Conan had one of the worst memory leaks in the history of gaming when they launched, it was eventually patched, and now it runs smoothly.

The question is if bethesda is willing to devote resources to tuning up the game, especially with people not even experiencing issues. Despite what we see on the internet, There are still people who are not having issues. I went to gamestop to ask for a refund - just for the hell of it; I knew it wasn't going to fly - and the manager there was legitimately shocked. He was curious to his file size ballooning up to over 12 mb's with over 60 hours played. However, he wasn't experiencing any issues.

I honestly believe BGS would screw up a ps3 patch. They clearly have not learned anything from their past experiences. They just are not good at writing game code.

Besides the faulty framerates and input lag, there's still another whopping elephant in the room, the horrid texture blur on everything as a result from anti-aliasing.

The only way I see the ps3 version even being on par with the xbox version is if bethesda fronts out some cash to hire programmers that are deeply familiar with sony's coding. I'm not holding my breath.

Long story short; It will get better, but most likely will not be on par with the 360 edition.

Damn, that svcks. Sounds like I'll be trading for a 360 version...prolly have to eat 40 bucks in the process.

Are PC users experiencing any of these issues?

Yea. It svcks pretty hard. The worst part about this is that BGS has come such a long way. Their design philosophy is nearly flawless, and skyrim is legitimately a heavyweight contender for one of the best games of the decade. But when you don't have good fundamental coding, it will set you back everytime.

I knew something like this was going to happen as soon as I walked into my local gamestop for the midnight release. They had the two consoles set up for playtesting at 10:30pm, and the 360 edition was just lightyears better. I honestly contemplated asking for my money back, but ended up toughing it out.

Another aggravating thing is how a bethesda rep can't fully acknowledge the problems this game is having, on all ends. Just going on twitter and saying "We recognize the performance issues that some are having with the ps3 edition of skyrim, specifically the framerate drops and input lag. We are doing are best to remedy the situation and appreciate your patience in the matter" would do wonders for PR and would calm down alot of rabid consumers who are pulling their hair out at the moment.

Moments like these affirm my belief that blizzard is the greatest development studio of all time. Whenever something major isn't working as it should, you can count on at least one rep to acknowledge it almost immediately. All it takes is one statement to make your fans know that you're listening to their plight. Of course, a lot more goes into that belief, but they wouldn't be applicable to this situation.