Skyrim’s PS3 lag explained

So the Skyrim patch has come and gone and the lag issue…is pretty much still there. While there have been some reports of things getting sorted (and other things breaking even more) – the further into the game you get, the more things start lagging.

The PlayStation 3 has been worst-hit by this bug – but is it really a bug?

According to a Eurogamer report, where they investigated the PS3 lag in some more detail, it’s probably not a bug, but rather a fundamental design issue with the PS3 itself.

Answering questions on his Formspring account, Obsidian’s Fallout lead designer, Joshua Sawyer, explains how they ran into similar lag issues with New Vegas running on the PS3. Essentially what it boiled down to was how the console accesses memory.

Skyrim’s database files in the engine are currently the same as the Fallout 3/New Vegas engine, and every time something shifts, changes or moves around in the game world, that data is logged.

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

So why does the PS3 get it so bad?

“The Xbox 360 has a unified memory pool: 512 megs of RAM usable as system memory or graphics memory,” he said. “The PS3 has a divided memory pool: 256 megs for system, 256 for graphics. It’s the same total amount of memory, but not as flexible for a developer to make use of.”

He also said that it’s not something simple to fix; it’s a fundamental part of the engine and the way it draws data – not a piece of code that they got wrong.

So basically what this all boils down to is that the more you do in Skyrim, the more you shift around, and the bigger your save file gets – the more the PS3’s limited memory pool is going to struggle to keep up, and the more you’re game is going to lag.

And it’s going to take Bethesda a bit more than a couple of coding tweaks to fix it up.