Opinions don't change the fact that their details are marred by an overly-aggressive, poorly-implemented (because it's overly-aggressive) version of an FXAA-type, post-process filter.

Except "overly-agressive" and "poorly-implemented" are also just opinions.

Indeed they may be, but the purpose of FXAA is not to destroy texture quality, it's to act as a minimalistic (on resources) alternative or augment to contemporary AA forms. When someone sets it to be aggressive enough for it to attack and cripple textures to the degree it does, they're implementing it at a severe cost to graphical fidelity. If one could see the textures beneath the blurring with a more minimalistic FXAA approach, I doubt many would opt for the current situation. In any case, you've merely attacked my adjectives and not the fact of the matter that the AA approach does counter the meaning of its existence and does mar the textures. In context to the quote I was replying to, no, the textures are not fine, they're being ruined because the FXAA Bethesda have implemented is overly-aggressive in relation to what it's intended for and what it should optimally be set to and as such is poorly implemented because it ends up severely taxing one facet of visual fidelity.

I dont care what skyrim looks like I juse run the game with over 5 fps

That is a problem then. We should not even joke about accepting this sloppy thievery.

I can tell as I am a texture guy myself, that the PS3's blurry textures all over the place is not entirely due to the AA filter. I personally see pros and cons to the filter but I would've rather had pixel edges compared to this. Back on point though, if you look at comparison shots of hair, leather, steel, chainmail, skin and eyes, you will see that:

the textures are either...

1) not loading in fully way too often or in some cases never.

-OR-

2) many of the textures on the PS3 are actually different textures as you can clearly see from either a lack of pixels or a compression method.

-OR-

3) that one of the ways they have been making the game less laggy in these patches were to either compress or resize some of the most used/largest textures to smaller pixel-ratios which would account for what we see going on.

-OR-

4) and this is purely speculative, but maybe even not updating all the textures completely after every time a texture was re-worked on the 360/PC.


And yes, I know the AA filter blurs some textures but that's mostly in the background and the filter is mostly used to soften edges not textures which get "baked" onto an object in mip-mapped stages as you get closer to the texture in-game. So the textures up close should not look as blurry as they do on the PS3 in some cases. On my copy, and it seemed it wasn't like this before patch 1.2, but all my smaller green pines have very blurry branches that almsot look like N64 graphics up close.

i would rather it looked like morrowind and worked! (with no load screens preferrably)...awesome content. screw all this graphics quibling...

Good point. I was just joining in with the quibble but I agree with you, the texture quality should be the last thing they patch if they ever do on the PS3, for there is much more dreadful problems to fix.

I dont understand why programmers of bathesda did not take advantage of the powerfull CPU of PS3 (3.2ghz cell engine with 1 ppe and 7 spes) in order to deliver best results in every multiplatform they release?

Don't forget that the game was actually playing fine during the first hours of gameplay (excluding the horrible introduction in the beginning).
I was one of the early adopters and found the framerate to be perfectly acceptable at first. There was no way I could have tested the game reaching further into it to see the problems. Furthermore, my slow playing style, as I tend to stay in one location for a lot of time or just wander around to admire the landscape, helped me to actually put a lot of hours into the game without running into the major framerate flactuations.

If the problem was clear from the beginning I would never encourage people to get the game. It's not a clear case like Codemaster's F1 2011 where that game was clearly inferior in all aspects compared to the xbox version from the start.

Because they couldn't. Maybe it was lack of skill or resources, or even time.

This would require a massive amount of new code for the old engine. In fact, way more than just pimping up the rendering pipeline (memory management, resource handling, multi-core usage, script interpretation, etc.). The problem is ... it cost much (!) more than just tweaking the old one a bit. Time isn't that crucial here, because you can compensate this (let's say in 3 years of the whole development procedure) this by hiring more capable programmers ... well, again costs ...

..and yet they sold it at the standard retail price. Business as usual.

Morrowind TRIBUNAL looks fine on the XBOX360 upscaled. I agree, I would much rather have Skyrim Content, running on the MW TB engine and have a working game than a game that doesnt work, and waiting 4+ months for a patch to make it actually playable.

Morrowind Tribunal > Skyrim
Morrowind Tribunal > Oblivion

the pathetic ps3 framerate is the issue.... not the AA or the gfx...that god awful framerate

I don't blame people, but even though it may have been decent at the start, even then, as lensoftruth and DigitalFoudnry reveal, near Riverwood, it's constantly fluctuating in the upper 20s and I can certainly feel it. In the tundra near Whiterun it was decent enough... lucky enough that nothing needs to really be rendered in the tundra. Anywhere outside of really barren areas or in small interiors, however, and even then the problems are noticeable, but yeah, at the beginning, it seemed okay. It wasn't at a constant 30 fps and that ticked me off, but I thought it wouldn't get any worse than that... then I took a trip to the fall forest and Morthal, started exploring dungeons other than burial mounds, and in general simply left the tundra. Still not happy with a fluctuating upper 20s framerate, but it was okay... a bit choppy and a bit sluggish, but okay. In any case, the truly bad part is what it indicated... the engine was already struggling even in less demanding areas, this game clearly isn't very well-optimized for the PS3 and if only we could see it through the early-release hype and honeymoon period... and that's just the base performance. It's utterly unplayable garbage for the people unfortunate enough to get the long-term issues with lack of memory consideration.

Indeed. You know... the PS3's CPU is superior to the 360's (partitioned differently and requires a different rendering path and specialized coding language, but that's standard for a completely separate platform) and Skyrim is a very CPU-intensive game... makes me wonder. Skyrim could have been great on the PS3, what with the PS3's greatest asset, its CPU, coincidentally managing to match Skyrim's most demanding hardware component and Bethesda still not taking advantage of those capabilities... Money's all that speaks.