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

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.

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…..

^ 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.

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

IGN calls out Bethesda…

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/121/1214016p1.html

@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.

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!

…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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 >:-(

@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?

“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.”

@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.

JM

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!! :’(