A Fallout: New Vegas dev provides some insight to 1Up about what may be causes some of the woes plaguing gamers across its various platform.
Lag: apparently, some PS3 Elder Scrolls V players have it and Obsidian Entertainment project director Josh Sawyer has some thoughts about why performance issues have caused trouble for Bethesda's latest. It's especially an issue on the particularly on the PS3, and based on his experience working with the engine used for Fallout: New Vegas--which similarly faced performance issues upon release--offered up some ideas about their origins for Skyrim. Note, Sawyer's comments were based on a November correspondence to 1Up, prior to the recent patch which itself caused some new complications for gamers.
Apparently, the lag issue for the PS3 version of the game can be traced to the way that the 360 and PS3 handle memory, with the PS3 divvying up its memory at 256 megs for system performance and another 256 for graphics (vs. the 360, which keeps all of its memory unified in one 512 meg block). This is compounded by the size of save games, which tend to get larger and larger as they account for "bit differences"--changes in the world such as dead, looted enemies, object placement, etc.--and when loading the game, the console has to account for all of these changes, which then becomes a drag on the performance.
Asked why this issue simply wasn't accounted for during the development process, Sawyer answered that the problem afflicting New Vegas was inherent to the engine and therefore required a substantial, possibly unfeasible amount of resources to fix. Given that Skyrim operates on a new engine entirely, it's unclear to what extent what, if any flaws, from the previous engine made their way over. However, Bethesda remains on the case and promises they will continue to investigate fixes for the title.
[via 1Up]
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