Quick point of order: In a 7 hour work day (9-5, an hour for lunch), you'll notice that after *ten days* of work.
Just to put it in perspective!
Digital Foundry VS Bethesda: PS3 Skyrim is still shit
- Thread starter AgentOtaku
- Start date
Quick point of order: In a 7 hour work day (9-5, an hour for lunch), you'll notice that after *ten days* of work.
Just to put it in perspective!
That's the sad truth. People need to stop buying Beth games and raise a huge stink about it.
freenudemacusers
Member
I don't know why people keep saying this, as it isn't true. Fast travel will cause a good number of these stutters and drops, it just gets worse and more frequent with longer play. I had this on the first day I played the game.
Ah, fair enough. Perhaps the cited 65 hours is when you get the complete freezes for noticeable lengths of time, given that it's an issue which gradually increases?
It's also worthy of note that it looks like how bad it is is dependent on *how you play*.
Oppo
Member
The leading theory is that it is a memory leak. So everything you change in the world slows down the game by a tiny bit, adding up to the death of a thousand cuts.
Fast-travelling will highlight some apects of this but really just playing the game, interacting with objects, completing quests, etc is the problem, it seems.
Is that a memory leak?
My observation is that its an overabundance of nondisc save data being loaded from the save file and applying it to the cached/installed world of Skyrim, and adjusting the game on the fly to show the proper behavior. The memory fills up and to keep the game from crashing, it flushes some data and reapplies data over and over from save file to the world to RAM, fills it up, flushes some, etc etc just to keep things running. Since hard drives are an order of magnitude slower than RAM, and since data has to reach RAM to even work, it brings the whole thing to its knees.
Serious question, is that the definition of memory leak? Or would it be categorized as lack of available RAM?
Lionheart1337
Member
In short, the game is too fucking big and bloated. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Uno Venova
Banned
The patch is a band aid fix, it will still get horrible framerates over time return it and never look back.
If you can play it on PC, that's easily the best version. It's not even a question.
So.. you expect reviewers to stay late at their jobs ignoring their families to put 100 hours into Skyrim and write a review before the deadline while also playing and reviewing tons of other games (not to mention the fact that they weren't even given PS3 versions in the first place)? I think expecting them to put 100 hours is more than a bit ridiculous. C'mon. You can't blame reviewers for this.
Fine Ham Abounds
Member
Experience told me to buy the 360 version, but I never expected it to end up this bad. This is a cryin shame.
Truespeed
Member
As a person who is currently on a Dec 12th deadline and looking at >100 hours of work to make that date, I wish I could get a free pass for not doing my job because I want to be home with my family.
I'm sure our users will be totally understanding that I give them an unfinished product because it's ridiculous to expect me to finish the job I'm paid to do. Because family.
NEOPARADIGM
Banned
lorebringer
Member
No this isn't technically a memory leak, although the symptoms are similar. A memory leak occurs when memory is allocated for use by something but the reference to it is lost so that it can't be accessed again for deallocation. If they were storing variables relating to the game state in some data structure and then losing the pointer somewhere so they couldn't free that memory up or reassign values to it then they would have a memory leak. What they have is a save system that stores changes made to a fixed template of what the game looks like and so ends up reaching impractical sizes after a certain amount of changes have been made to the world. It's possible this could also be an issue for any machine depending on how long that particular save has been played for but in practice is only manifesting on the PS3 due to it's low system memory pool.
Edit: So yeah, lack of RAM.
John Rabbit
Banned
what country do you live in?
RedNumberFive
Banned
Sounds a lot like my December, so I can sympathize. I only wish that those hours were getting paid to sit on my ass and play games.
Actually, I was just basing it on Dolly Parton's song.
RoadHazard
Gold Member
No, it's not. A memory leak is when data which is no longer being used by a program is still stored in memory instead of that memory being released back to the system like it should, preventing it from being used for other things. Often this happens again and again. More and more memory is used but then never released, causing the memory used by the program to grow ever larger for no good reason.
This is not that. This is a lack of RAM (or rather code unsuited for the PS3's RAM setup).
EDIT: Beaten.
DCharlie
And even i am moderately surprised
lol, yeah, i've been working weekends and on calls three times a week until 1am and have been doing so since June and i'd love to get a pass out (this week is the last week, ironically, i'll probably use all that time to play skyrim (i'm selling off the ps3 version, getting the x360 version))
That said - i get that they most likely sank a ton of time into -one- console version and maybe gave the other version a very quick look to confirm it's like-for-like. I don't particular blame any of the review sites for not hammering down 100 hours on all versions.
nickbreckon
Bethesda Community Manager
The autosave issue is the reason it thrashes when entering areas, waiting, etc. I can wait 5 seconds for the system to catch up.
The rest is like playing Doom on a 386 12 mhz with turbo off and less than 3MB of RAM. Garbage.
I haven't decided if I can wait that long. They blatantly lied up to this point. I'm not even sure what to think. How can I trust there will be a legit fix? My copy will go down in value in the meantime and previous ps3 games are still broken.
Royal fuckup, this.
The rest is like playing Doom on a 386 12 mhz with turbo off and less than 3MB of RAM. Garbage.
I haven't decided if I can wait that long. They blatantly lied up to this point. I'm not even sure what to think. How can I trust there will be a legit fix? My copy will go down in value in the meantime and previous ps3 games are still broken.
Royal fuckup, this.
i'm hoping the 360 patch comes out soon.
Galactic Fork
A little fluff between the ears never did any harm...
I love how they begin the update by downplaying the situation.
Uno Venova
Banned
Uggghhhh, I don't know what the hell to do...wait for the off chance they fix the problem and save my 50 hour character that never got to finish the game, or spend and extra 50 bucks and go with the other version.
Last night I finished Skyrim on PS3 and got the Platinum Trophy (160 hours). I'll post some of the PS3 technicals on my play though here.
First off, this is the first Bethesda game that I didn't simply turn off after 5-8 hours. I prefer JRPGs and more polished games, but Skyrim's world captivated me to fully play the game.
The first 40-50 hours of play I had very few issues. 2 hard crashes & 1 infinite loading screen transition, my save file was under 6MB. Then once my save file hit around 6.6MB the game really started to hiccup, not slide show yet. This is when I started to check the forums & read into the issues.
Around 60 hours I changed my play style since I guessed where this was all going. I maxed out my Speech Skill basically to get a good money supply and slowed down interacting with the world. I stopped grabbing items, searching chests, looting bodies, reading books, etc.. I could make my own potions & sell them for more cash than what I ever needed. I build my ultimate Dragon Scale armor and was on my way to invincibility.
Around 80 hours, my savefile was 9.8MB when the 1.2 patch hit, which dropped is to 9.1 MB. Pre-patch, major slideshows 0 FPS all over the place. I could play for 30 mins then would have to drop to the XMB & restart. I was very close to stop playing. The patch extended that play time to around 2-3 hours before restarting.
I got hit with the Winterhold Legion Quest bug show stopper and had to restart a few hours of play to side with Stormcloaks instead.
From 100 to 160 hours, savefile from 9.1MB to only 11MB. I completely stopped interacting with the world as much as I could. Kill the enemies & ignore everything. The game hard locked about 10 times total.
For me there was no need to grab anything in the world for the last half of my play though. I could craft my own equipment, make my own potions for money, just buy everything, to not change any world state.
My suggestion if you want to fully finish up on PS3 is severely limit your changes on the world. It's not the ideal solution since you should be able to fully immerse yourself & fully interact, but unfortunately Skyrim on PS3 performance degrades as you play.
First off, this is the first Bethesda game that I didn't simply turn off after 5-8 hours. I prefer JRPGs and more polished games, but Skyrim's world captivated me to fully play the game.
The first 40-50 hours of play I had very few issues. 2 hard crashes & 1 infinite loading screen transition, my save file was under 6MB. Then once my save file hit around 6.6MB the game really started to hiccup, not slide show yet. This is when I started to check the forums & read into the issues.
Around 60 hours I changed my play style since I guessed where this was all going. I maxed out my Speech Skill basically to get a good money supply and slowed down interacting with the world. I stopped grabbing items, searching chests, looting bodies, reading books, etc.. I could make my own potions & sell them for more cash than what I ever needed. I build my ultimate Dragon Scale armor and was on my way to invincibility.
Around 80 hours, my savefile was 9.8MB when the 1.2 patch hit, which dropped is to 9.1 MB. Pre-patch, major slideshows 0 FPS all over the place. I could play for 30 mins then would have to drop to the XMB & restart. I was very close to stop playing. The patch extended that play time to around 2-3 hours before restarting.
I got hit with the Winterhold Legion Quest bug show stopper and had to restart a few hours of play to side with Stormcloaks instead.
From 100 to 160 hours, savefile from 9.1MB to only 11MB. I completely stopped interacting with the world as much as I could. Kill the enemies & ignore everything. The game hard locked about 10 times total.
For me there was no need to grab anything in the world for the last half of my play though. I could craft my own equipment, make my own potions for money, just buy everything, to not change any world state.
My suggestion if you want to fully finish up on PS3 is severely limit your changes on the world. It's not the ideal solution since you should be able to fully immerse yourself & fully interact, but unfortunately Skyrim on PS3 performance degrades as you play.
Screw Bethesda. They'll keep working on it? Like how they kept working on the F3 bugs and issues that were never fixed through multiple games using that engine. Bethesda's assurances are the most hollow, insincere, and worthless pieces of PR drivel ever.
Got the same issues (broken resists, backwards dragons etc) the other versions got with their patch.
Don't ask such a stupid question. All versions including the 360 have something wrong with them.
nickbreckon
Bethesda Community Manager
Hey, we hear you guys. It's not an effort to downplay the situation, but to explain what the situation is for the people having problems. It's a combination of smaller issues, and like the post says, we've been actively tracking those down and will be addressing them in a future patch.
Any chance of the 360 patch this week or am I too hopeful?
Uno Venova
Banned
Are we talking weeks or months here? No idea yet?
Great question! Nick, you guys know people already have this and new copies are going under Christmas trees right? ETA?
nickbreckon
Bethesda Community Manager
Definitely not "months." We can't put a date on it yet, because as we noted in our last update, we want to be sure our future patches are top quality. That said, we're all working hard on getting these improvements out as soon as possible, and we'll keep you updated as often as we can.
Treemonkeys
Member
What you (Bethesda) did is like me selling a used game to someone that I know seems to work but will crash when you get to a certain level because there is a scratch on the disk.
You scammed PS3 owners, plain and simple. Scammed them.
Now I'm sitting here waiting for you guys to fix broken quests but you're too busy fixing the completely non-functional version you decided to sell for $60.
JORMBO
Darkness no more
Any sort of rough estimate? I put the game back on the shelf because it's unplayable.
AgentP
Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
To be fair, the PS3 is a fixed machine and Bethesda knew how much RAM they have, it is not something that has changed. So it is not a lack of RAM, it is bad memory management or bad garbage collection. Bethesda should know how their save system works and either leave enough RAM available or periodically cleanup the save delta reseting the world more often.
Sure, if you install the 1.2 patch (which is, admittedly, broken)
I'm now clocking 108 hours, and have experienced zero problems running off the disc, except for a "possible" missing snow texture on the guard tower outside of Bleak Falls Barrow. No crashes, hiccups, slowdowns, texture streaming issues or backwards flying dragons.
Just the usual wonkiness from Beth games, like the random NPC stuck in the door and companion stupidity.
Treemonkeys
Member
Same amount of RAM that was there when they made Oblivion PS3 and it had the same problems. Whoever green-lighted the PS3 version is a scumbag.