The framerate is horrible in this game for most people from what I've heard. But I watched a vid on youtube and seconds later bought myself a SSD and could not be happier. The framerate drop is all but gone, load-times are faster entering buildings and what-not and the game is generally more stable to boot.

If people can afford it and would like to reap the benefits from more games using the harddrive to load stuff, this is absolutely a problem solver for this games horrible framerate... Only problem it's not cheap, and buying a game at around $60-70 is usually the cost that you want to pay up, and not an additional 150 or so bucks.

Sorry if this has been posted before, just thought some might be interested to know if they didn't already.

PS. My charater is currently lvl 45, has a save file of around 13mb with around 70 hours of playtime. Mind ya'll, before I installed my SSD the game was lagging like a ************.... Also, if anyone does decide to get a SSD installed, beware to synch all trophies as they will be lost otherwise.

I thought about doing this but in the long run I just can't justify spending any more money on this game.

How does one synch all trophies?

This is not a fix for me.

I have a 40gb PS3 upgraded to 320gb as I own 64 games and use a fair bit of HD space to keep all their install files on.
I have 121gb free out of 320gb. I'd have to buy a 320gb SSD which would cost more than a new PS3!

a 60gb one is useless to me.

ONly if you don't mind throwing away money.


For the same price you could buy a 360 and a USED copy of the game.

Well if you are online on your ps3 you can either synch by pressing triangle on the trophy icon which leads the the list of game trophies and choose synch or if I remember correctly you can just check your own profile to the far right on your XMB.

MenePS3: Of course everyone has different needs, for me... I had a 60gig with around 30 games.... I only have like 10 games at most installed though cause I know I will not play most of them many more times, and if a friend comes over to play, the install really ain't that bad... Unless MGS4 is the choice of game Now I have a 115gig corsair which isn't a whole lot more of course, but really I don't need to install every game on my console... Of course if you already spent money on getting a bigger HDD getting a new smaller one feels like crap, for sure. But other games also benefit from change of drive, especially GT5 which gets halved load times

DTR: This is the PS3 section, so why even mention the xbox, doesn't solve anything. Also getting yourself a Xbox is like shooting yourself in the foot after having a newly mended fracture in your foot.

I'll probably be putting an SSD on my Christmas list.

Partly for Skyrim, but I would also like to see its performance with PS Home. If I'm impressed, I'll be getting one for my gal!

I've never used Home, but from all the vids I've seen on youtube and all the reviews of people with SSD in their PS3 Home especially shows huge improvement.

Use a seagate momentus XT its a hybrid model. gb of ssd and what ever model you buy i think there are three versions up to 500 gb.. less heat then current 7200 rpm drives as well...... the ssd drives have super fast cache which reduces the lag in game. These drives improve performance with most games. The ONLY benefit from these drives is the fast IO times that is it......

I still fear that this will just delay problems though, since it really seems like the real issue is the ram.
It would really svck to waste money on a ssd disk to only discover that it starts lagging again later in the game.

By later in the game what do you mean? I've been playing the game without SSD first around 60 hours/12mb file size and the lagging is beyond redemption... Playing with the SSD for extended period of time shows no sign of major framerate drop at all. The problem isn't the ram, it's bad programming. Fact is Bethesda don't know how to work the PS3 since the system is different from your average computer.

The reason the SSD helps the framerate is (like c0mat0se mentions) the I/O. The game loads a lot of the stuff directly from the PS3 which on a HDD at 5400rpm loads a lot slower than a SSD. This will not change over time.

I can quite easily see how this would fix the loading / pop in stuttering / mini freezes, but even if I had that sort of money, I'd just buy an xbox.

Well it isn't the cheapest fix, unless you can find a SSD at 80-100 bucks (Cheap in my opinion)... But this solution still seems better than Bethesdas own homecooked killing machine of a patch, who is trying to destroy the game rather than fix it ^^ Which is why I recommend it to anyone who feels they can afford it.

This game was made for the xbox. the programming doesnt really support the way the ps3 is set up. Im not going to get to specific but xbox more like a pc with the way graphics and ram is used. PS3 has numerous dedicated processors each with a specific job. Harder to program for... This is not a question of xbox or ps3 being better. The problem is with the programming. Whoever ported this game did not optimize it for the PS3. Bethesda will essentially have to reprogram the enitre game.... which I doubt they will. I quick fix would be having everything reset as you leave a dungeon or specific area. So everything you look at or drop and kill simply disappears so the game doesnt have to remember it. What Bethesda should have done is not released on PS3 at all, or delayed the PS3 release until the game was fully optimized for the system.

Another point I want to make is I beleive some of these problems can be related to style of play... Playing as battlemage you have multiple spells and weapons and the more stuff you need unlike playing strictly as a warrior or mage. Another thing is how many quests you have active at one time. Are you the type of player that looks through every chest and house or read every book you come accross, I beleive this is why some people are having problems and some are not.. I beleive that it will eventually will catch up with them.