If your game has become unplayable due to lag, does that apply to new characters you make? ie escape Helgen and start lagging right away?

if you make a new character the game deletes all your save files lol

No it doesn't.

And I made a new character to test it and that characters game plays just fine. I even tried attacking the guards in whiterun and getting the whole town after me (if I did that in my old characters file my PS3 probably would have exploded, Michael Bay style).

The lag is random, it doesn't matter if you have 8k memory or less on a save file.

I was practically JUST STARTING my game when I discovered EXTREME lag during Imperial Legion quests.

Then it stopped.

Now, after countless frustrating quest bugs/ NPC interactions/ frame rate issues later -- my game crashes.

i played my new character for about 7-8 hours for a total of 10 hours on and off but without turning my ps3 off and the framerate was fine, maybe a couple of drops here and there but i guess that was loading textures.

Of course it works fine. The problem only occurs after you've dumped 20+ hours into it. I only made it to 24hrs before it became unplayable. I have a brand new PS3 I bought specifically for Skyrim, so I know it's not the system.

Well... the fall forest and geyser area are ALWAYS choppy and sluggish for me, regardless of play time. The problem just gets bad enough to spread to other areas and amplify the problems with the already problematic areas, over time, but I've never received anything above ~25 fps in the fall forest region or the geyser region... ever.

Tell that to the people who's saves vanished.

Ouch

Just saw that thread after I made that post. Odd that it doesn't happen to everyone, and some people only have 1 or 2 files get deleted.

What if you have already put 40 hours into one character, then begin a new one, will the system still recognise the memory you've used on the other character?

I started a new character and none of my old characters were deleted. Are you relying on autosaves only?

My other character was over 40 hours in with a 12 MB save. Everything seemed to work fine on my other char, though admittedly I did only go through the intro, run to that small town before whiterun (forget it's name), buy some stuff, run a quick quest, then run to whiterun to attack the guards (maybe an hour of playing altogether).

But on my other save, a whole town fighting me would have instantly gone to slideshow mode, and I would have been experiencing small framerate issues even in the wilderness within 15-20 minutes.