That 'single line in the config' is far more important than you're giving it credit for.
No it isn't. A 1 instead of a 0 doesn't take any appreciative amount of RAM.
It's in the realms of being tenuous, and that's why the PS3 had so many problems after long-play, it became so full of information it ran out of space.
Which had to do with the game trying to reference HUNDREDS of objects in hundreds of cells and thousands of script values. It has to do with save file gradually bloating with dozens of hours of play, but you're fantasizing about some sort of hard limit that is always there. The difference between the two situations is so immense, it's clear to me that you are making everything up.
Not one cell in the game has anywhere near hundreds of trees.
Hundreds of objects, definitely. But apparently we can only have sixty! Otherwise the game would crash.
And the frame-rate is -and-was appalling, so what's your point? If that happened in normal play, people would be outraged.
Havok calculations kill framerate. Each second requires highly complex formulas to run on each object. A piece of armor, once loaded, costs NOTHING except having to render it. And you were talking about memory costs, not fps.
Because the world was no where near as detailed. Most of it was even procedurally-generated in order to save memory.
None of it was procedurally-generated, except in development. Every copy of Oblivion is the same, and it all takes up memory anyways. Generating things on the fly would COST memory. I know little about computers, but you're making me feel like Bill Gates. Skyrim does NOT have a more detailed world. I mod both games, and both have cells with 3D objects in them. No real difference. Skyrim's wilderness is less demanding on my PC, even.
For one, there is no speedtree, they are full 3d models now.
Really? Because they look worse, honestly.
But masses of cheese rolling down a cliff side is only possible if the player initiates it. At no time does such a thing happen in normal game play, Where as NPCs wearing clothing or armor is.
The "argument" was that having an extra armor slot would *crash* the game. Even a 360 doesn't crash from a few cheese wheels running down a slope. And yet HAVOK is vastly more demanding on the resources than loading an extra item.
Complete and utter bull [censored]. Oblivion would start to lag from ~10 NPCs. The AI was heavily optimized back then. Skyrim, I have seen 20+ NPCs with no sign of performance hit.
Because of the AI. Oblivion would lag from 10 naked NPCs the same as 10 equipped NPCs. Go try it! I'm serious! You can test your theories scientifically.
But enough to cut into performance, yes. Remember that console games need to be able to run at a damn near constant 30FPS under any circumstance.
Go load up twenty naked NPCs and measure FPS. Then load up twenty clothed and armored NPCs. Until then, I call BS.
due to the mesh polygons as well as the extra data pertaining to the beards equip slot.
Infinitesimally, it's true there would be a difference. The game has to render a LOT of things, and each little item makes a barely-noticeable difference. This is the heart of why Bethesda's excuse is so laughable.