PS3 Skyrim stutter-bug linked to Fallout: New Vegas glitches

Monday, 5th December 2011 14:09 GMT By Johnny Cullen

Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has suggested the reasons framerate slowing in the PS3 version of Skyrim are similar to those that plagued the Obsidian RPG.

The Bethesda RPG was patched last week to fix issues with the PS3 version, including stuttering caused by large save files.

However, it seems the update has made things worse rather than better for most owners.

The Obsidian developer, who helped make the Fallout spin-off last year, explained in a Formspring Q&A that higher memory management capacity on PS3 than 360 or PC coupled with functionality of the game’s engine itself was causing the problem.

“It’s an engine-level issue with how the save game data is stored off as bit flag differences compared to the placed instances in the main .esm + DLC .esms,” he said.

“As the game modifies any placed instance of an object, those changes are stored off into what is essentially another .esm. When you load the save game, you’re loading all of those differences into resident memory.”

There’s no simple fix, according to Sawyer’s comments.

“It’s not like someone wrote a function and put a decimal point in the wrong place or declared something as a float when it should have been an int,” he said.

“We’re talking about how the engine fundamentally saves off and references data at run time. Restructuring how that works would require a large time commitment. Obsidian also only had that engine for a total of 18 months prior to F:NV being released, which is a relatively short time to understand all of the details of how the technology works.”

There’s more on Sawyer’s Q&A here.

Breaking news


Sign in to post a comment.


  1. Ireland Michael

    tl;dr translation: You’re fucked, PS3 owners.

    #1 2 years ago
  2. Jet Black

    Bethesda PS3 Forums link = Not good…

    #2 2 years ago
  3. Suikoden Fan

    Bethesda made games are the only multiplat games i’d buy on 360 instead of ps3

    #3 2 years ago
  4. Dark

    I hope bethesda get sued for this!

    #4 2 years ago
  5. The_Red

    “It’s an engine-level issue with how the save…” I knew it. This “brand new” engine has the same problems as the super old engine they’ve been using for Fallout 3 and NV? Bethesda’s much touted “Creation” engine is nothing but an upgraded Gamebryo.

    #5 2 years ago
  6. Mike

    This is the crux of it:

    Is the inflating save file just an issue for the PS3 (I’ve seen lots of lag/crash complaints from PS3 users) or does it happen on all platforms? I’m just wondering if other platforms handle it better than the PS3.


    “divided memory pool”?



    So it’s the way the system is built, the hardware, that’s the fudamental problem.

    #6 2 years ago
  7. Ireland Michael

    The problem is entirely with the hardware and it’s horribly restrictive RAM limitations. The machine simply can’t access the amount of data the game is feeding it.

    There’s almost nothing you can do to fix this without completely redesigning the games saving process from scratch, and that could cause even more problems. Entire processes would have to be rewritten.

    I put all the blame here on Sony’s horribly designed hardware, but Bethesda still shouldn’t have released it in this kind of state regardless.

    @6 Just the PS3.

    Any PC that can run this game is powerful enough to handle the memory pooling already, and the file never gets big enough for the 360 to be affected either.

    It’s not just about the split memory though. It’s also about how fast the machine can access it, feed it in and send it back out.

    Let’s just say the PS3 is still very much in Special Ed class in that area…

    #7 2 years ago
  8. Maxey

    While Bethesda has nothing to do with how the PS3 hardware is like, they should’ve figured out a way to work around it.

    #8 2 years ago
  9. OrbitMonkey

    Something to look forward to :-(

    #9 2 years ago
  10. Joe Musashi

    Logically, the issue cannot be exclusively hardware – no matter how much some people would want it to be.

    Hardware doesn’t program itself. Bugs don’t create themselves. Software doesn’t write itself. You don’t need to be gifted with any special insight to appreciate this, just a little common sense.

    If the issue relates to something from a game’s tech that’s, what?, a year or so old, then it points to a combination of programming, engine development (or lack of) and, just as importantly, quality assurance (or lack of).

    5 years after a machine’s release is, I think, sufficient time to have expected professional programmers releasing commercial software to understand the specific demands of each hardware platform. Given that these people have already released multiple commercial titles for the platform already, it’s not an unrealistic expectation.

    Bethesda have only cemented their reputation as a firm happy to release catastrophically bug-ridden software and patches that do as much harm as good.


    #10 2 years ago
  11. Mike

    @8 – how do you know it’s possible?

    #11 2 years ago
  12. Ireland Michael

    @10 The only way to reduce this problem would be to lower the number of flags being monitored at any one time. And considering the game we’re talking about here, that’s not really an option.

    The save data is literally choking your PS3 to death. It’s feeding it so much that it can no longer breath.

    The PS3 CPU and GRAM communicate at 16MB/s (not a typo…) between a split 512MB. The 360 communicates at 22GB/s to a full 512MB of RAM.

    That’s a rather startling difference.

    Sony’s own specs slide:

    It’s like building a car with already punctured wheels. The car might be great, but without decent parts, it’s not going to mean jack.

    #12 2 years ago
  13. Mike

    @10: Yeah, you tell yourself that. A piece of fundamentally flawed hardware isn’t the issue, it’s the developer…

    #13 2 years ago
  14. KAP

    Ive just platinum’d this during the weekend clocking over 160hrs and selling all my unwanted stuff leaving me with 200,000 coins yet have got shit load of misc and sides mishs to do so I’m gonna leave skyrim until they actually decide to fix the lag because thats the only reason I cant enjoy myself exploring without it lagging to the point of the game crashing.

    Its bad, very bad.

    And at 14mb and counting I cant and wont 100% this game until they sort it out.

    #14 2 years ago
  15. IL DUCE

    @4 you’re stupid dude they’re not going to get sued for anything…buying a bethesda game there’s gonna be bugs…360 is consistently the lead platform, so buy it for 360…the ps3 is garbage anyway, mine collects dust besides when I occassionally would like to watch a bluray

    #15 2 years ago
  16. Clupula

    This is what happens when you make cheap, easy 360-to-PS3 ports, instead of working directly with the hardware. They should have gone the route of trying to optimize each game for the hardware it’s released on, but Bethesda have never shown much care for the PS3 side of their business.

    #16 2 years ago
  17. Joe Musashi

    @13 When other developers using the same hardware can produce vast games with thousands of entities in them without these sort of issues then logically the difference is the developers.

    You can either use logic or prejudice to draw an outsider’s conclusion of where the issue lies. This game didn’t program itself and the hardware it’s running on is no different to the hardware that hundreds of other games manage to run fine on.

    And even if a game’s remit is outside the scope of the hardware’s ability then it should not be made for that hardware. That, again, is a decision carried out and executed by the people behind this game, not the silicon it runs on.

    Bad workmen ALWAYS blame the tools. Ingenious programmers can get around many limitations with talent, time and effort. Doom running on scientific calculators shows you just what can be done with talented programming on constrictive hardware.

    It’s makes no sense to remove the scope of human-error from a product made by hundreds of humans and blame it entirely on the thing that, like any computer, can do nothing for itself until instructed to do so by others. It also makes no sense to dismiss all accountability from a studio that has a reputation for producing buggy software and buggy patches – not just on this game but on many earlier ones.

    Either way, this game was not fit for release and has been riddled with bugs for all platforms.


    #17 2 years ago
  18. Clupula

    @17 – Exactly. There are some people out there who, I don’t know, Jack Trenton must’ve raped their mothers or something, because they’ll find any excuse to rag on Sony.

    Is the PS3 hardware restrictive? Of course it is. There’s no denying that. However, other developers, who put more care into their work, seem to be able to find ways around it.

    #18 2 years ago
  19. Ireland Michael

    @17 I agree with you completely on the point that they simply shouldn’t have made something for hardware they knew couldn’t handle it.

    Personally, I’m blaming the tools *and* the workmen. A broken wrench is always going to be useless, but only a stupid workman keeps using it.

    I don’t think Mike is making this into “a hardware fight”. The facts of the system limitations are a clear detriment to the potential quality of the game though. This isn’t a “bug”. It’s fundamental hardware limitations.

    @18 How many games can you count with the same level of scope in them at The Elder Scrolls games? Not many, I wager. You would have to strip out half the content of the game to stop this problem from occurring.

    #19 2 years ago
  20. robmlufc

    Basically they figured they could do a simple port across to PS3 but didnt look into it enough.

    #20 2 years ago
  21. Joe Musashi

    Hardware limitations can be worked around. Always. My Doom example demonstrates this. That the game will, undoubtedly, get patched to a workable standard will also support this argument.

    I think the issue is entirely with the slack codebase, the inadequate QA and, above all, the commercial need to release the software before it was ready for release.

    Limited hardware means as much today as it did when Elite was running in 32kb.


    #21 2 years ago
  22. OrbitMonkey

    Hey if Bethesda want to openly admit they can’t or more likely won’t work around the PS3 tech, that’s their problem.

    I don’t know how big Demon Souls, final fantasy of White Knight Chronicles are in comparison, but they don’t sound small. Did they have these issues? No. Does Bethesda really care? No.

    #22 2 years ago
  23. Phoenixblight

    But this isn’t Bathesda saying its the engine but Obsidian. Then again when has a Obsidian game ever not been riff with issues?

    #23 2 years ago
  24. Gekidami

    Add Oblivion to that list (not forgetting LA Noire for that matter). Rather ironic that one Elder Scrolls game can run perfectly on PS3 (in fact much better than the original 360 version) but for FO3 and Skyrim suddenly there are issues.

    Of course it probably wont surprise anyone to learn that Bethesda didnt do the PS3 version of Oblivion, it was made by 4J Studios.

    #24 2 years ago
  25. NiceFellow

    This is squarely Bethesda’s and a software issue. The PS3 having split memory and requiring certain engine approaches is irrelivent. Bethesda know how the PS3 is designed.

    You either develop your engine to work on HW or you don’t. You can’t develop it badly for a given hardware spec then blame the hardware. That’s not how it works – and I speak as an ex professional coder.

    Either the engine should have been developed properly to support all intended platforms (id’s Tech5 springs to mind as a good example, or the latest CoD engine under MW3, or the engine under Dead Space 2) or you take the fall for fucking up.

    At the end of the day the developer has produced software which is fundamentally flawed for one of its platforms and, in the best interests of us consumers, needs to be sued and generally beaten up until it spends money to re-code the required elements of said engine. Given they already have the money in the bank for all the initial sales I think it’s a given they’re going to have to do this – probably in stages judging by the first, initial patch.

    The PS3/360 have different designs and each is perfectly capable of supporting the same games so long as the code is properly written and designed to work on each.

    #25 2 years ago
  26. Ireland Michael

    @22 Are White Night Chronicles or Final Fantasy computing the reactions and statuses of hundreds of NPCs across a hundred miles of terrain, alongside countless mobs, items and quests? No, they aren’t.

    Do these games have procedurally generated content connected to an enormous selection of quests, with tonnes of these being taken into consideration every time you so much as pass an NPC? No, they don’t.

    Every time you fight a mob in a random battle in Final Fantasy, it take five seconds or so just to lead the creature’s data, graphics and A.I.. It’s a loading screen hidden behind a fancy swirly effect. As soon as the fight ends, that data is dumped again. The actual game itself holds onto very little data.

    That’s not an option for a game like Skyrim, for fairly obvious reasons. A mob you spotted 20 hours ago is still going to be guarding that location when you go back. That bandit you killed? It’s still going to be lying there, waiting to be looted. All those trinkets you left lying around your house? The game needs to remember all of that.

    That data needs to be stored somewhere. The PS3′S ability to read this information directly is, to put it bluntly, fucking abysmal. A 16MBs local memory reading speed was bad even when the PS2 was around. It’s insultingly poor and lazy.

    I’m not setting this let’s Bethesda off the hook though. They never should have released something if the hardware can’t even handle it, without fundamental changes to the code first.

    #26 2 years ago
  27. ManuOtaku

    For me the key issue here is multiplatfom games, because the devs need to focus on two very distint machines and most of the times they base their work on a lead platform, therefore one of the two is going to have a product that doesnt run so smoothly compare with the other, in the xbox side of things we have Final Fantasy XIII, and in the ps3 we have bayoneta, fear 2, dead dead redemption, etc, its just the way it is plain and simple.

    In this particular case, is like a marriage, the fault is 50% on the two sides , one for having a different hardware and not being involve hand in hand with the dev to assure things went going ok, and the other for not having the right amount of people, money or time to assure a nice running game without this important issue.
    P.S oblivion doesnt count on this becuase it did have a very different time line , work approach and other developer.

    #27 2 years ago
  28. NiceFellow

    @26 oh c’mon. The HDD in the PS3 is faster for I/O than a DVD and the PS3 has more than enough memory for Skyrim plus the radiant engine.

    The issue is the underlying code hasn’t been properly written for the PS3 hardware vs 360/PC and Bethesda have failed to support what I understand (I play their stuff on PC myself) is at least 30 to 35% of their audience on PS3.

    Even the thousands of bits of info to be checked in Skyrim shouldn’t be an issue. It’s not what the game needs to do it’s how it does it that’s the problem.

    While updating the engine (which let’s face it is Oblivion 1.5 rather than Oblivion 2.0) the should have invested in re-writing the core approach to how the engine managed that data on PS3.

    Costly? Sure. But that’s the cost of supporting the PS3. They should either accept it to get the millions of PS3 sales or not support the platform and simply release on 360/PC.

    Instead they’ve taken the greedy, lazy route of figuring they could get away with a certain level of sub-standard product on PS3 and take the money.

    Sure the PS3 isn’t designed as the easiest platform to code for, and arguably should have been, but that’s just the way it is. The consumer should come first if you want to support them and that means figuring out how to better balance memory, multi-core threading, I/O and use of the SPUs.

    Heck, let’s not forget on PC you can’t even get at the theoretical capabilities of the engine because it’s capped in its use of multiple cores: another example, although far less game breaking, of Bethesda aiming pretty low with the engine design and leveraging of platforms.

    Anyone with any tech knowledge can see they built it from the ground up on 360, ported to PC and added a few better textures and a small smattering of extra trinkets and ported to PS3 while playing with basic graphical setting as a (very crude) method of tuning the thing on PS3.

    Really shoddy for games with those kinds of sales figures vs the many examples of sterling, truly multi-platform optimized engined we’ve been seeing for years now.

    #28 2 years ago
  29. OrbitMonkey

    Sorry Michael, but the hardware can handle it. It’s the programming that wasn’t up to scratch. But hey games crashing is just par for the course with Bethesda, don’t matter what platform.

    #29 2 years ago
  30. Razor

    Well, the very bright side to all of this is that we can say for certain that PS4 will be a better designed game system.

    I think Sony have learnt their lesson…

    #30 2 years ago
  31. Cygnar

    Not even Skyrim requires even a fraction of 16mb of NPC data each and every second. Processing literally everything at once is poor programming.

    #31 2 years ago
  32. Joe Musashi


    Erm, if you’re going to assign any blame to a lump of inert silicon then none of the above make ANY difference. All that matters is that the game exists on PS3.


    #32 2 years ago
  33. get2sammyb

    Would Ireland Michael care to explain why Oblivion was a triumph on PS3? Especially if the hardware’s at fault.

    Though I do agree with his point. If Bethesda couldn’t release a quality product on the hardware they’ve had five years to learn, then they probably shouldn’t have bothered at all.

    #33 2 years ago
  34. ManuOtaku

    #32 no becaue it was a very different project, especially with a very different timeline, a one which multiplatform games doesnt have, my point still stands if you read the whole thing.

    #34 2 years ago
  35. get2sammyb

    @34: That’s rubbish. If one developer could get something working while another couldn’t, then it stands to fact that the developer that couldn’t should be held accountable. Regardless of timelines or otherwise.

    #35 2 years ago
  36. Joe Musashi

    @34 No. If you’re busy blaming hardware than all that matters is that the game exists. Dismissing it because it doesn’t quite fit with the already broken logic you’re using is just childish. If your point stands, it stands against every example. If you have to resort to excluding examples that diminish your argument then it simply shows your argument wasn’t very good in the first place and that you don’t have a better way of responding.


    #36 2 years ago
  37. ManuOtaku

    #36 again read my comment, take the time please and you see i didnt blame any particular hardware, i did put examples of many games on both machines that were multiplatforms on the same day of release that had this same problem, all of them were made by different devs therefore one can argue this issue it is very common in this gen.

    And thats the key word same day of release, not an almost year later like in oblivion case, with different resources and different dev, thats a whole different thing not having the pressure of a simultanesly release, therefore thats why i put not oblivion as an example of this, a reason which can be see as a childish way of thinking, is your opinion and i respect it, maybe because although i have 36 i have my inner child alive and kicking, so thanks in that regard.

    #37 2 years ago
  38. Maxey

    Everyone knows the PS3 is tricky to properly program for but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest the time and money to learn how to work stuff around it, mainly when it’s a big title like Skyrim.

    It also doesn’t help that Bethesda has already released two games for the PS3 and still hasn’t mastered its tricks yet.

    It’s not like Bethesda doesn’t have both the resources and manpower to do that but we all know they can’t make a properly polished game to save their lives.

    #38 2 years ago
  39. get2sammyb

    @37: The issues in Bayonetta and Red Dead Redemption are not comparable to this though. Particularly the latter — which was functional on both platforms, albeit some slight performance differences.

    Bayonetta is a better example, but the game still worked as advertised. It just didn’t run or look anywhere near as good as its XBOX 360 counterpart.

    The issue here is that one version of the game is fundamentally broken. This isn’t minor resolution or texture differences, this is serious.

    The blame is at Bethesda’s feet for not either: a) delaying the PS3 game; b) cancelling the PS3 game, or; c) taking the time to fix the PS3 game.

    #39 2 years ago
  40. ManuOtaku

    #39 i agree with that, it is very different this is a more serious issue, i just did want to state the multiplatform side of things that maybe affected the development cycle.

    #40 2 years ago
  41. deathgaze

    We take our technical advice from Obsidian since when?

    #41 2 years ago
  42. Ireland Michael


    Bethesda should not have to rewrite its entire codebase because of stupid design on the part of Sony’s hardware.

    @33 1) There is far less going on in that game on a computational level. It was also far from a triumph. Do a quick search and you’ll find tonnes of complaints of lag issues in that game on the PS3.

    The graphics were slightly clearly, and locations loaded faster. That’s it. Neither of those bare any relation to this.

    You’re completely misunderstanding the problem, which is completely different to either of those. This is information that needs to be accessible at all times, and needs to be stored in a location (local memory) that is not used by any other part of the system, in order to ensure that it can be accessed swiftly even when other parts of the system are being heavily utilised (such as the GPU).

    The 360 reads this information this at a speed of about 22 GIGAbtyes a second. The PS3 does this at a speed of about 16 megabytes a second. Even Sony themselves, when unveiling these stats privately to game developers, had to admit that it wasn’t a typo, and was in fact that slow. How the fuck do you make a system like this that’s a few hundred times *slower*?! It’s fucking ridiculous.

    it is a constraint that *all* developers have to work around, its a restraint that most developers hate because it’s such piss poor fucking design, and its a handicap that doesn’t exist on any current format and *shouldn’t* exist in the first place. And this wouldn’t even be an issue right now.

    If all of this information wasn’t instantly available in the way that it is, the game wouldn’t even be able to function. The only other solution is to simplify the game’s mechanics. Less procedural questing, less NPCs, less random generation of quests or mob or items. And that would be fucking boring.

    Sony needs to design their systems better, it’s that simple. The PS3 has better graphics than most 360 games, yet it can barely load a menu during a game without seconds of lag, or allow a group of people to communicate privately in real time, things my PC have been able to do without breaking a sweat for the past 10 or more years.

    #42 2 years ago
  43. Jet Black

    Beginnings of a product recall of Skyrim stock for PS3?

    #43 2 years ago
  44. NiceFellow


    “Bethesda should not have to rewrite its entire codebase because of stupid design on the part of Sony’s hardware.”

    Actually, yes they should. You see you keep looking at is as Sony/PS3 problem. It’s not. The PS3, warts and all, is what it is. You might as well argue Nintendo deliberately designed the Wii not to support Skyrim.

    The second Bethesda chose to develop and publish Skyrim on PS3 they, and they alone, are responsible for the code and how it performs. They, and they alone, have a care of duty to achieve a certain level of quality.

    If that needed a nearly 100% re-design of their code then so be it. Or don’t support the PS3 with Skyrim.

    But, let’s be honest, they went for the money and screwed consumers in the process.

    They could have said the game wouldn’t work on PS3, made it 360/PC exclusive and been done with it.

    But they didn’t. They chose to put it on PS3 and take millions of consumers money, and that makes them 100% responsible for the quality of their product.

    Arguing about PS3 specifications is simply to require an excuse.

    There is no excuse. They failed their customers and they have to solve it.

    Should PS3 be easier to program for? Sure. Changes nothing. Nobody made Bethesda support the platform. They chose to. And that choice puts the responsibility on their shoulders.

    Also, quotes from 2006 that fly in the face of actual titles on PS3 really carry little weight at this point. Awkward or not you can code the PS3 to support a game like Skyrim. Bethesda simply didn’t do so well.

    #44 2 years ago
  45. Ireland Michael

    @44 The hardware specs are the same now as they were then.

    What Sony did with their hardware towards developers is the equivalent of someone selling you a car with square wheels and telling you that you that you don’t have any other option but to use them. Sure, it might work, but its not going to be particularly easy or fun.

    #45 2 years ago
  46. OrbitMonkey

    @44, +1. It’s laughable that supposedly intelligent people will look at a obvious code fault and say it’s the hardware’s fault. It’s not. Not in anyway.

    If the PS3 had changed its design midway through the making of Skyrim, then fair enough. But the fact is its the same machine Bethesda have released 3 big open world games on. I think that’s more than enough time to figure it out.

    But hey this is Bethesda, they know where their bread is buttered. The 360, and that’s who they keep sweet. A good example of their lackadaisical approach to the PS3, is the anniversary edition of Oblivion.

    How much effort would it have taken to put in a trophy system? But could they be bothered? Nope.

    Still love Skyrim, but some of the shine is taken off, by their treatment of separate platforms :-(

    #46 2 years ago
  47. NiceFellow

    @45 sorry but you’re wrong Michael. The situation is more analogous to a car maker who produces cars for left hand drive in France. They want to sell their cars in UK, they have to – at great cost – redesign their production process to produce right hand drive versions of their car.

    Bethesda is wrong no matter how hard you try and blame the HW for somehow conspiring against them.

    As for the specs that’s my point. Despite the specs Oblivion works on PS3. Despite the specs Uncharted 2 with the technically challenging train sequence works on PS3.

    The PS3 is simply not analogous with selling a car with square wheels. Sorry, that just doesn’t wash. You’re trying to make one flawed title the majority and ignore the true majority of perfectly working titles.

    Skyrim however is a case of a left hand car hastily – perhaps too hastily and with too severe flaws – being converted to right hand drive. And the blame lies with the company that made the choice to try it.

    Honestly, if you’re going to keep ignoring the true commerical responsibility of Bethesda in this and keep trying to focus on PS3 I’m not going to bother replying as you’re simply stuck defending an incorrect position.

    Personally if Bethesda don’t solve this soon I hope they find themselves having to accept a product recall, with all the expense to Bethesda that would entail.

    Let’s be clear here – they chose to take the money of PS3 owners. They are not some poor developer valiantly fighting the PS3 specs to get their game working. They are a developer who have always been better at designing than coding games – all their games have been suspect technically – who made the mistake of designing for 360/PC first and foremost and producing a shoddy – I’d argue so shoddy consumers have a valid reason to demand a full refund – product on PS3.

    Again, that is 100% Bethesda’s problem.

    If you can’t see that I’d love to have you as a customer as you seem happy to place blame anywhere but where it belongs and accept being treated poorly by your suppliers.

    #47 2 years ago
  48. Fin

    Yer, you don’t get to blame the hardware when 30-40% of your userbase is on that hardware.

    Could the PS3 be better? Sure, but that’s no excuse for releasing a poor quality patch/port/bug.

    #48 2 years ago
  49. Gekidami

    A guy over on the official forums has looked into what could be causing the problem and he seems to have pin pointed it down to a memory leak:

    Worth pointing out that the guy estimates that the 360 version will also start to suffer from the lag after extended play (though thats REALLY extended, within the 200 hour mark), and there are some reports of this apparently being the case:

    #49 2 years ago
  50. Mike

    I wonder what it will take for people to realise that PS3 is poorly designed from the ground up? Year after year we hear developers say the same thing, only for them to be called “lazy” or simply negligent.

    Whose word are we going to believe? Who has to tell us that yeah, it’s flawed, so flawed the certain gaming experiences simply won’t run as well as PC etc?

    Kaz? Kan K? Who? You’ve all heard it so many times yet you never believe it. The. machine. is. poorly. designed. The. end.

    That doesn’t make it “rubbish,” that doesn’t mean that some games built specifically with the machine in mind aren’t amazing, but it does mean that multi-platform titles will suffer in a 3-player market with one weak member. You’re always going to develop mainly for the other two – as we’ve seen time and time again with only a few exceptions.

    #50 2 years ago
  51. OrbitMonkey

    Year after year we hear it’s hard to programme for… Then games like Uncharted, Ratchet and clank, Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid come out and we see what can be done if you put the effort in.

    Instead of putting all your eggs in the 360 basket and throwing out a cheap port for the pc/PS3.

    #51 2 years ago
  52. fearmonkey

    Blame Sony for halving the 512mb total memory, if it was unified this wouldn’t be an issue. Yes, other developers, who developed for PS3 first, have not had the issues, but the underlying engine for these games is a PC engine that is memory starved.
    PS2 had the 4mb frame buffer, and PS3 has the 256/256 memory layout, just really dumb design decisions.
    I’m no fanboy, MS almost made the mistake of having 256mb, and they might make the same mistake in the future going with 2GB instead of at least 4.
    Unified memory is the way to go, Im hoping MS remembers that for the next console, I bet Sony does it much better next gen…..

    #52 2 years ago
  53. OrbitMonkey

    ^ Y’know I’m betting the devs actually know this. The point is Bethesda can’t bothered to program for it from the ground up.

    #53 2 years ago
  54. Jet Black

    & I bet they couldn’t even be bothered to test the game either…

    #54 2 years ago
  55. Jet Black

    IGN calls out Bethesda…

    #55 2 years ago
  56. Ireland Michael

    @51 Your point? Different games have completely different ways of coding stuff. Most of the games you just listed, for instance, have very little data that actually needs to be stored or retained long term.

    Metal Gear Solid, for instance, can’t even keep enemy formation information retained between more than a few rooms, and it has a loading screen between every (incredibly small) location.

    @53 What part of “the machine can’t read the information fast enough” do you not understand? This isn’t something you can just “recode”. The *problem* with the hardware is a severe one. The *only* way you could make this system work is if every item you put down disappeared, every mob you killed despawned after looting them, and all the NPCs lost procedural awareness. You’d probably have to ditch the “radial” questing system as well.

    The game needs to retain this information. It needs to be prioritised, or IT SIMPLY WON’T WORK. If you *want* it to work, the game would have to be fundamentally redesigned and half the things you enjoy about it would have to be ripped out.

    Look at the speed difference between the 360′s ability to read from local memory, and the PS3′s. It’s not just a slight difference. It’s a few hundred times slower.

    And do you know what Sony’s response was? “Oh, don’t use it.” Yes, lets not use a basic feature of all multi-core processors, one that’s at the very centre of HOW THEY WORK!

    The system reads information slower than it can write it. This is utterly retarded.

    Why is it that when a Xbox 360 game say… requires more than one disc it gets blamed for “ruining a game” (see: FFXIII), but as soon as the PS3 has a limitation that impacts on a tittle, it’s not the hardware’s fault, but the developer?

    A device without a Blu-ray Drive is out-dated, but a system that can’t even read information from prioritised memory at anything slower than a snails pace isn’t? Please, spare me.

    There is no magic button that can fix this problem besides new hardware.

    #56 2 years ago
  57. Jet Black

    Quote from Pete Hines before Skyrim was released…

    “watched Todd play Skyrim for quite a while. Had no idea he was playing PS3 version until he held up controller. So PS3 owners don’t fret”

    I smell PR BS!

    #57 2 years ago
  58. Gekidami

    …Erm, Michael, you do know that the RSX local memory is pretty much worthless, right? The CELL doesnt need to access it (or barely and only if its told to) hence its slow read speed. The PS3′s main memory is XDR. I mean, arent you a journo? Yet you’re going off a piece from the fucking Inquirer of all things that was pretty much instantly debunked by devs? i mean seriously? I’m glad you dont work for a bigger site is all i can say.

    If you want to throw around numbers at least get your facts straight and try to have a minimum of knowledge on what you’re actually blurting out.

    #58 2 years ago
  59. NiceFellow

    @58 why even bother trying to point out his errors? He’s obviously got a big case of confirmation bias going on.

    Unless I’m totally getting it wrong he’s basically saying it’s Sony’s fault a software developer didn’t develop an engine that ran properly on Sony’s hardware, while into the bargain completely ignoring the fact than many equally complex games somehow are able to run perfectly fine on that self same hardware.

    Totally nuts.

    #59 2 years ago
  60. Ireland Michael

    Guess we’ll see in a few weeks, when Bethesda (hopefully) tackles this issue.

    #60 2 years ago
  61. OrbitMonkey

    Er I made my point quite clear Michael. You keep banging your drum about the PS3, it obviously keeps you happy. Fact is Bethesda have made a dodgy game on for a machine whose limitations they are fully aware off.

    Their priority is and always has been the 360 version, which they then port over to pc/PS3. It’s cheaper and it shows.

    #61 2 years ago
  62. raygun

    You all quoting the 16mb/s, did you actually look at the dam chart? May be you should. Sure there appears to be a problem with cell reads to local memory (16MB/s), but it writes to local memory at 4GB/s??? But who cares, the cells read and write to main memory at 16.8GB/s and 24.9GB/s! And the RSX read and writes local memory at 22.4GB/s, and main memory at 15.5GB/s and 10.6GB/s. Do you really think any competent programmer would decide to use the cell read from local memory for anything, with this knowledge???

    #62 2 years ago
  63. Cygnar

    Someone like you could never understand the thrill of being angry about computer part specs.

    #63 2 years ago
  64. Mike W

    Seeing how well the game is received, I don’t see Bethesda ever handling the situation on the PS3. It’s a shame really to see how foolish and ignorant these developers are this generation. How long have we been hearing the PS3 is a pain in the balls to develop for? And these guys are still making the same excuses that System A is more easier to develop for than System B and C.

    #64 2 years ago
  65. Talyis

    Screw Bethesda, they ruined the game for me! I’m so pissed off it’s a bunch of crap! I want my 180 dollars back for the collectors edition game and strategy guide, no point in owning something that don’t work >:-(

    #65 2 years ago
  66. raygun

    @63 I’ve built about 10 pc’s so yes i do know about hardware issues. Morrowind would crash because of sound card issues. That would make me angry. Buying a new pc game and having it crash first run, and having to go online to find solutions..that’s why I gave up on Pc gaming. Do I agree that Bethesda is somewhat lame, YES. JustCause2 had a huge sandbox, great graphics, no stuttering on the PS3, so what’s their problem?

    #66 2 years ago
  67. raygun

    “It isn’t at all unusual for the video memory to have incredible write speeds and painfully slow read speeds (back to the CPU that is). The reason is that in 3d graphics the video card does the actual rendering. Therefore you simply tell it “I want a blue triangle at the coordinates X,Y,Z (x3) with T texture applied”. The card renders it and applies the texture from texture memory and then displays it onto the screen. You never need to read the (texture) memory, because the data contained in it is throw away (why would you need to read the texture in that you sent to the card?)

    So it is perfectly normal for texture memory to be nearly write-only. As long as writing to it is extremely fast (which it is in this case according to the PP slide), that isn’t a problem.”

    #67 2 years ago
  68. Joe Musashi

    @49 If it turns out to be a memory leak then that’s 100% programming issue and quite likely to affect all platforms in time. Given how crucial memory management is in today’s development processes (irrespective of platform) and the fact that standard dev tools from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and others will include profiling tools to assist automated monitoring of resources to locate stress hotspots, it really does smack of shoddy work.

    Those who argued how it must be hardware and can’t be developers appear to be losing considerable ground on this one.


    #68 2 years ago
  69. OrbitMonkey

    Well anyone who downloaded the fastest patch and discovered that all types of resistance have been removed, must kinda realise that Bethesda are not the best programmers. That’s all magical, disease and poisen resistance.

    Including your racial abilities, or armour you enchanted. None that means shit now. That’s on ALL platforms I believe. If your on ps3 you get the added bonus of pacifist dragons. Blood dragon just flies around looking at my Breton, whose special power and racial trait now mean squat.

    It must take a special skill to create a patch that doesn’t fix something, but makes it worse. Go Bethesda!! :’(

    #69 2 years ago