Dev explains why Skyrim lag wont get fixed.

[Ordinaryundone]

Have not picked it up yet for the PS3, and I am hopeful that the problems get fixed.

So, Skyrim, the Escapist's Choice BEST GAME OF ALL TIME, is unplayable in 1/3 of the copies.

Yep. It's just that good, even the 33% who can't play it think its the best game ever!

OT: 360 version, no issues to speak of, just over 40 hours. I've a friend with the PS3 version, and while he's had the occassional FPS stutter its nothing like the huge drops reported in the article. He's put in about the same amount of time as me, though, and doesn't play in very long bursts.

To all those having trouble, I'd recommend limiting plays to less than an hour. If you want to go over, restart your system every hour or so. Its annoying, but it should help a little. Just imagine you are playing the PC version and crashing to desktop or something.

 

[mikey7339]

Well so much for trying to get a platinum trophy in this game...

 

[TheGuy(wantstobe)]

I don't know what's going on with some of the people, but I have clocked in over 120 hours on my first play-through and I've had the game freeze on me ONCE and very little lags. I think people just need to take care of their system/game better or something...

If you'd read the answers to the problem by a dev who's worked on the engine before you'd see that it's a fundamental problem with how the game tracks the states of various objects in the world by changing bit structure on placement, holding, ai routine to run etc with objects that must be loaded each time taking the worst toll on the system such as NPCs and companions.
If in your 120 hour save you've only visited Falkreath, Whiterun, Windhelm and the college of magic and Markarath (and a few dungeons along the way) and never taken out a a single companion or touched any placeable object such as the various pots and pans that are lying around you probably won't have a major problem but if you visited/interacted with more people, objects etc in the time it takes for the game to reset certain fields (3 ingame days for non static container contents as an example) you'd also be facing these problems.

>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<

With regards to the engine it is the Gamebryo engine with a new coat of paint without any of the underlying problems sorted out.

 

[Epona]

I don't know what's going on with some of the people, but I have clocked in over 120 hours on my first play-through and I've had the game freeze on me ONCE and very little lags. I think people just need to take care of their system/game better or something...

It's official the PS3 version lags. Don't tell others they aren't taking care of their PS3 just because you have been lucky thus far. My PS3 is a little over a month old and it lags just as bad as some of the worst videos I've seen. Bethesda deserves a lawsuit over selling a game that is unplayable.

 

[HoradricNoob]

Ha ha! 8 GB of RAM on my PC. Try and lag me now, sucker! Or, at least try when I get Skyrim for Christmas...

From what I understand, Skyrim can not and will not use all 8. The cap for the game is 4.

 

[Combustion Kevin]

no problems on the PC, whaddayaknow?

still, wont the PS3 users get a refund?

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

Ha ha! 8 GB of RAM on my PC. Try and lag me now, sucker! Or, at least try when I get Skyrim for Christmas...

From what I understand, Skyrim can not and will not use all 8. The cap for the game is 4.

And it only uses 2gb without a user made work around.

 

[Therumancer]

Hmmm, interesting, it does make me wonder if this is actally going to come back to nail Beth because the way it sounds to me is they released a buggy and defective product they can't fix, and knew what they were doing when they did it.

Personally, I do have to wonder why with the money they have been making off of these titles they haven't re-designed the engine or developed a new (but similar) one.

I actually hope Betheada doesn't get sued successfully for this simply because I like their games and want to see more of them (they do something others in the industry do not even attempt) but it's hard to say that they don't deserve it.

 

[Epona]

While I doubt a complete fix is coming for the PS3 version, I also kind of doubt this problem is truly impossible to solve. Things like this are unfixable only until they get fixed, if you take my meaning.

This isn't a new thing for Bethesda games and the PS3 and they didn't fix this problems in previous games. One would think that if they couldn't fix the problem with patches in the two Fallout games then they would have fixed them when they were developing Skyrim. That they didn't suggests that they can't fix it and they shouldn't have released a broken game on the PS3. They purposely withheld the PS3 version from reviewers pre-release and now we know why.

 

[Epona]

I thought Fallout: New Vegas was the last game they were going to use with that game engine. Not sure where I heard it, but I thought they were using a new engine starting with Skyrim. Maybe it was Fallout 4, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing.

The engine is "new".. but they've reused a tonne of the same code

The engine is not new, it's heavily modified. It seems to me they could have included a fix for this when they were modifying the engine but I suppose that wasn't a priority for Beth.

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

I thought Fallout: New Vegas was the last game they were going to use with that game engine. Not sure where I heard it, but I thought they were using a new engine starting with Skyrim. Maybe it was Fallout 4, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing.

The engine is "new".. but they've reused a tonne of the same code

The engine is not new, it's heavily modified. It seems to me they could have included a fix for this when they were modifying the engine but I suppose that wasn't a priority for Beth.

I was Air quoting because i was implying it wasnt really new.
Im pretty sure Bethesda have claimed it is new though.. but yeah its pretty much the same old engine.

 

[Irridium]

And this is why I can never actually support them as a company. They knowingly release broken products and charge full price for them.

 

[Darkmantle]

Lol, it's a good thing console wars have died down lately, die hard xbox fans would be all over this . poor PS3 and it's split ram

 

[Irridium]

I thought Fallout: New Vegas was the last game they were going to use with that game engine. Not sure where I heard it, but I thought they were using a new engine starting with Skyrim. Maybe it was Fallout 4, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing.

Oh no, they said it was a new engine. But really it's just a heavily modified version of the Gamebryo engine.

Like how they said Gamebryo was new yet it was a heavily modified version of the NetImmerse engine that Morrowind used.

 

[Richardplex]

and I simply restarted my console and no lag since. I always assumed the PS3 had superior hardware to the 360. Guess I was wrong.

Hardwares on par with 360, they just have a REALLY weird architecture (the whole split RAM thing, and the whole no voice chat because of OS taking up RAM thing a while back too).

In my opinion Beth should offer everyone with the PS3 version a digital download for the PC version, seeing as it actually works (I use the term works rather loosely, dam constant random crashes) and they probably paid more for the PS3 version then the steam price.
Although, proving who actually owns a copy of a PS3 game would be a logistics nightmare...

But... the point of using a save file is that those changes aren't in the memory all the time.

Well the save file itself is actually there so you can.. well, save your game and store it somewhere so it can be reloaded into the memory at a later point, rather then to just be accessed instead of the memory.

Why it doesnt just read certain parts of the save memory related to the zone your in and load JUST that still baffles me though.
But hey, Im no engine coder, Im just talking out my ass.

Ps3 has some level of steamworks no? I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to sort something out with that.

OT: Well, I learned why FO:NV fails after playing it a while. And I'm glad I switched to PC gaming.

 

[TheCruxis]

Great...so now I know why my game is unplayable, and it can't be fixed. Brilliant, just fucking brilliant Bethesda.

 

[Furioso]

Well thanks Bethesda, you have officially bricked my gigantic save file, so many hours went into it, and it's way to daunting to make a new character at the moment, guess I won't be finishing this game for a while *goes off to sulk in profound disappointment*

 

[MCGT]

I know I'm not making any friends with this statement but:

And this is why the PC is the superiour platform. Because it can have the power I want it to have, I am not limited to 6y old hardware, I am not depending on the big brands to release a console when 1/3 of the playerbase has already surpassed them by far in terms of hardware.

My personal rant aside:

I don't understand why they released it on the PS3. This problem must've been obvious and since they didn't bother to fix it they just thrown out a broken version... Yay for that Bethesda. Keep making games for PC where we are able to fix your problems or make the ports actually playable. (Yes, I know that the PC version is a 360 port)

Yeah but how well would a 6 year old computer handle Skyrim? So unless you have the money to upgrade/update your computer every year that argument doesn't really hold much water.

Although don't know why I'm getting involved in this, console wars are so last year.

 

[Levethian]

Could they make some inhabited interior cells reset their basic common items to save on memory?

It always bugs me that no NPC ever tidies up. I mistakenly FUS-RO-DAH'd myself in Dragonsreach, and now the tables are bare, kitchenware spread across the hall. And still there weeks later. Do they no longer need to eat?

 

[TheGuy(wantstobe)]

So basically, it's really, really, really bad memory management.

But yeah, it's either this or loading screens. I don't think developers these days have the time and resources to make a efficient file scream mechanism, especially for such a big game.

Yes and no. It's more the devs not being given ample time to come up with an engine solution for the PS3's memory constraints relative to the 360/PC due to the split memory pool architecture inside it. Can be explained but only through random numbers as I don't have exact figures on me

Let's say a game loads 128MB of texture and other graphical data and 128MB of general purpose data at any one time before savestate of objects is taken into account.
On the 360 you'll have 256MB of RAM free for your save to play around in due to it's single memory pool (512MB unified)
On the PS3 you'll have 128MB of RAM free to use for your save data. This is due to the way in which the RAM is set up with 2 separate and discrete 256MB pools with one for textural and graphical data and one for general purpose use. You can't use the remainder of the first RAM pool to complement the second one and so you have 128MB of wasted RAM that isn't being used and a smaller amount for the save data.

This does mean that in theory you could replicate it on the 360 but the effort required would likely be enormous ie in a 3 ingame day timeframe manipulate every single object in the world and change the contents of most if not all containers and NPCs and the positions of each companion and ai routine (set them all running for home from halfway acros the map at the same time etc)