OKAY, SO THIS TURNED OUT PRETTY LONG... A TO-THE-POINT VERSION IS BELOW THE WALL OF TEXT...

I'm simply going to start this by saying that I am NOT an Elder Scrolls fan and, in fact, Skyrim was the first in the series I had ever played. I was really looking forward to trying it out, though, as I had been wanting a good RPG for a while, and Oblivion simply never looked like the right game for me. So, just to see what all the hype was about, I rented Skyrim for a day to have a low-risk entry into the franchise (sorry, Bethesda, but I just didn't want to pay sixty bucks for something I knew very little about). However, when I put the disc in and started a new game, I was actually disturbed by the framerate. I am by no means an expert at discerning framerates just by looking at the screen, but I would place it at about 13-20 FPS for most of the opening sequence (until I entered the keep, at which point the framerate stabilized). The game played fine until I left the keep, at which point I wandered a bit off the path on my way to my next destination. Here, I found myself atop a highly pixelized, low-polygon mountain. I actually waited about thirty seconds to see if textures would pop-in, but they did not. After all this, I thought that Bethesda was simply lazy in making this game, and returned it to the rental kiosk very happy that I did not pay full price. The next day, I overheard some classmates speaking highly of the game's graphics. Furthermore, when I brought up the framerate issues I had, they said they had never noticed it. At the time I simply dismissed them as insane, although I have now come to realize that these extreme cases of framerate drops and pixelization are fairly localized occurrences. Now that I know this, I'll probably give Skyrim another shot once a patch is released, but I thought it would be best for me to share my experiences to possibly give Bethesda a bit of statistical data.

TO-THE-POINT:

Extreme framerate drops; possible texture loading issues
PS3 CECHE01 (One of the older models, it was originally 80GB and was backwards compatible with PS2 games)
HDD Upgraded to 320 GB (7200 RPM WD3200BEKT)
Wired Internet Connection (don't know how that would help with a completely offline game, but thought it wouldn't be a bad thing to throw in)

So, I don't know if any of this will help (or if Bethesda cares about PS3 gamers), but I thought it couldn't hurt to throw this info in. I know there's a lot of complaining about similar issues on these forums, but I'm happy to put out any information that may lead to a patch.

another victim... how far were you into the game. how big was your save file. how long was your gameplay time....