PS3 Skyrim Lag Problems Unlikely to be Solved
According to developers, Skyrim’s lag problems may never be solved on the PlayStation 3.
If you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ll be interested to know that the PS3 version of Bethesda’s hit title, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, is suffering some issues that have been very crippling to the overall experience of the game. The main issue seems to be with the fact that users who play the game for prolonged periods of time are experiencing memory and lag problems. What’s worse? A solution may never be found.
The developer answered a question from a user who started experiencing lag after his save file went up to 14 MB stating that it’s a major problem, more so on the PS3.
“That can easily be a big problem, especially if you’re on the PS3. The longer you play a character, the more bit differences on objects (characters, pencils on tables, containers, etc.) get saved off and carried around in memory. I think we’ve seen save games that are pushing 19 megs, which can be really crippling in some areas.”
They then went on to confirm that this is only common on the PS3.
“As with Fallout 3 and Skyrim, the problems are most pronounced on the PS3 because the PS3 has a divided memory pool.”
The user then wrote this:
“Since you’re a developer, you should understand the implication of what I wrote. 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. 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.
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. 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.”
It was then confirmed that no solution was on the horizon and that objects were actually removed from Fallout: New Vegas to stabilize the gameplay through later patches, a game that suffered the same problems that Skyrim does. It begs the question, why are PS3 users standing for such negligence when it comes to a finished game on their system? It’s definitely something that needs to be addressed and let’s hope that something gets done soon although it looks like that hope is lost.