» Tue May 15, 2012 2:06 pm I have been following this lag issue from day one and have experienced it myself on the PS3. I have 62 hours logged with 8.8MB save file and I experience some lag (especially in whiterun and outside in the snowy parts) but it is still very playable.
Here is my theory (and note, it is just my theory that I wanted to share based on the information that was presented in this forum in the last few days).
Starting from the good news: because I think this issue is basically identical to the Xbox 360 texture problem, then it will probably be fixed in the 1.2 patch that addresses it.
And now to my hypothesis:
The lag has nothing to do with the size of the save file. It is just correlated because of how long users have been playing and can occur at any size (although since they are correlated, you are likely to see it above 5mb).
The issue has to be the hard drive performance itself and the memory cache getting full. Basically, this HD performance issue is probably what's causing the texture problems on the xbox 360 when played from the hard drive (on PS3 we get lag and on xbox they get bad textures). (FYI - it would be interesting to know if 360 users get the textures issue on xbox SSD drives.....).
Here is why I think so -
1) Xbox 360 users only experience the texture issue when they install to the HD (playing from disc is fine) but PS3 users have to install the game to the hard drive.
2) Most of the biggest lag reports came from people that only had 1-3 save files and kept saving to the same ones. In fact, I'd argue that it is preferable to have many different save files to avoid fragmentation than saving to the same ones over and over again.
3) Whenever there is lag, notice that the hard drive is "stuck" reading (based on the light on the PS3).
4) Most people reported that defragmenting (rebuilding the DB & file system) on their PS3 solves the problem (although they will probably need to defrag every once in a while)
5) Other users said that installing SSD or faster HD solved the issue (again, installing a new HD means you start fresh with no fragmentation and SSD doesn't really have that issue since it has no mechanical arm).
6) Playing for long periods of times makes the lag worse because the memory and cache are all used up and so the cache needs to ping more and more the HD for data -> causing the lag issue. This is the reason that clearing your cache (by rebooting) avoids the heavy HD use until the cache is filled up again and starts missing all the time (meaning that it need to ping the HD more often).
7) Bethesda admitted that the 360 bug is related to caching and i'd argue that the same is true here for PS3. Combine the caching issue with slow/bad HD performance and voila - you get lag.
Assuming Bethesda will fix the caching issue then the HD will be used less and thus won't create so much lag (and xbox users will see textures correctly). So you can solve this issue by getting bigger cache/memory (unfortunately can't be done on consoles
), installing a better HD (SSD or defrag an existing one to increase perf), or make the cache algorithm better so it relies less on the HD (hopefully what patch 1.2 will do).Feel free to shoot me down - just wanted to throw my 2 cents to the mix.
Hopefully we can all keep enjoying this awesome game soon!
