Viele Spieler der PlayStation 3 Version von Skyrim berichten, dass das Spiel immer langsamer wird, je größer ihre Speicherdateien werden. Das Problem ist so schwerwiegend, dass die Framerate mitunter sogar auf 0 absinkt. Trotz eines vor kurzem veröffentlichten Patches haben viele Spieler dieses Problem noch immer, weshalb sich die Frage stellt, was da los ist.
Niemand weiß es! Da der Patch das Problem nicht beheben konnte, dürfte es sich um etwas handeln, das sich derzeit dem Verständnis von Bethesda entzieht, aber einige Techniksuperhirne (und Leute, die schon mit Bethesdas Rollenspiel-Engine arbeiten durften) haben so ihre Theorien.
Digital Foundry geht davon aus, dass es ein Problem mit unzuverlässigen Garbage Collectors (es handelt sich dabei um eine Speicher-Defragmentiermethode) sein könnte:
However, the most likely explanation is that an advanced Skyrim gameplay state - like the 65 hour one we tested - proves to be too much for the garbage collector, or memory defragmention method, struggling to cope with the multitude of gameplay elements that have been altered from the default "virgin" state stored on the hard drive. To test the possibility of this, we tried loading our 65 hour save and playing with it for 30 minutes, and then directly loading our new character save from the menu - the result being that the stuttering does indeed carry straight over to our virgin save. It suggests that memory has been allocated that the garbage collector cannot reclaim, which isn't flushed when the player returns to the menu screen and starts the game anew.
The bottom line is that Skyrim is an unbounded game world running on a space-constricted system - and this applies regardless of the platform you play it on, hence reports of the PC version running out of address space and displaying solid colours instead of textures. The PlayStation 3 is unfortunate in that it's the platform with the most oppressive RAM issues (in addition to the split-pool set-up of the memory, the OS has a larger footprint than its 360 equivalent) so it makes sense that it has the most noticeable issues. But we do have to wonder how 360 owners with a 65 hour-plus save are coping, and whether the same issue manifests for them - just further along in the gameplay.
Interessanterweise sagt Obsidians Josh Sawyer (Fallout: New Vegas), ein Mann, der schon mit Bethesdas Rollenspiel-Engines arbeitete, ähnliches und liefert dafür auch einige Beispiele:
The longer you play a character, the more bit differences on objects (characters, pencils on tables, containers, etc.) get saved off and carried around in memory. I think we've seen save games that are pushing 19 megs, which can be really crippling in some areas...It's an engine-level issue with how the save game data is stored off as bit flag differences compared to the placed instances in the main .esm + DLC .esms. As the game modifies any placed instance of an object, those changes are stored off into what is essentially another .esm. When you load the save game, you're loading all of those differences into resident memory.
It's not like someone wrote a function and put a decimal point in the wrong place or declared something as a float when it should have been an int. We're talking about how the engine fundamentally saves off and references data at run time. Restructuring how that works would require a large time commitment.
Sollte das Problem wirklich darin bestehen, dass alle Veränderungen, die der Spieler im Spiel vornimmt, aufgezeichnet werden müssen und dadurch die Speicherdateien immer größer werden, was sich negativ auf die Leistungsfähigkeit des Systems auswirkt, dann dürfte es nicht leicht werden, etwas dagegen zu unternehmen, da die PS3 in dieser Beziehung starken Beschränkungen unterliegt. Und das wäre wirklich schade.
Joshua Sawyer [Formspring]
Digital Foundry vs. PS3 Skyrim Lag [EuroGamer]
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