» Sat Nov 17, 2012 4:43 pm
Given how wildly different the architecture of the PS3 is from other consoles and the PC, this isn't really a surprise. Games really need to be rewritten from the ground up to get the full advantages of the PS3 hardware, and maintaining a separate codebase for a huge project like this is... daunting (i.e. time consuming and very, very expensive).
With a mere 256 Mb of CPU RAM, it's amazing that it works as well as it does now. Extra processors aren't much help in a game like this that has to deal with copious amounts of data being loaded, shuffled, and changed as the player moves around the world. If only there were such a thing as a PS3 memory expansion module or something, because that console could really use some more general purpose RAM...
Edit: Before anyone replies with 'But other games...'... no. Elder Scrolls games are almost unique in the amount of data they have to process to maintain an MMOesque open world on a single client machine. Most RPGs have more locality than games like this one, because they tend not to be designed with such generality and global scale entity management in mind. It's a series of sandbox games like no other, and has unique (and considerable) memory requirements for that... and CPUs can't cache data without RAM, of which consoles have limited amounts. Frankly... it's amazing the XBox360 version runs as well as it does, much less the PS3.