The game save gradually increases in size until performance is impacted, resulting in the same kind of performance drop we see in Skyrim.
Thanks to Eurogamer reader mcmothercruncher, who posted a revealing link to the Bethesda forums, this theory appears to have gained extra weight through Formspring comments by Obsidian's Joshua E Sawyer, lead designer and project director of Fallout: New Vegas - which ran on an earlier version of the same engine.īoth Fallout 3 and New Vegas exhibited an issue very close to that seen in Skyrim. It's an enormous undertaking to store all of this information, and of the three platforms Skyrim is available for, it's the PlayStation 3 that presents the most challenges from a memory management perspective. Our best theory on why it happened at all came down to the notion of an unbounded game world with thousands upon thousands of objects having to be tracked as they moved from their default positions as the player moved through the game. In our weekend article on the Skyrim PS3 lag issue, we analysed the performance of the game running from a fresh save compared to a crippled 65 hour game, and then put the new patch through its paces - and found it wanting.
