Bethesda admits they can't get Skyrim Dawnguard running on PS3

Seems they lead on XBox, loaded it with extra features and now find it difficult to squeeze it all in for the PS3 version. I'm sure it's doable but it'll probably come down to whether it's cost effective. It's not about size or delivery, it's about getting it running. I'm sure they've got people to run the numbers and see if it's worth the risk.

While I don't rule out that the PS3 port of Skyrim is a crap translation done as an afterthought, there are some technical constraints to the PS3 hardware that would make it very difficult to get a large open-world game such as Skyrim to work, and be able to extend it with DLC. The most important one being the memory model, where you can only access 256 of the 512 MB RAM directly from the CPU.

Most other games 'solve' the memory limitations of the PS3 by chopping up the game world and introducing lots of load screens, or by streaming as much of the content as possible. My guess would be that the Skyrim engine does the latter, which doesn't fit the PS3 memory model very well. The Blu-Ray drive is very slow for random-access, and I don't think you can stream textures and geometry directly to the 256 MB RAM segment accessible to the GPU, which means you would have to allocate part of the already-scarce 256 MB RAM in the other segment, and DMA it to the GPU-segment.

I'm not a PS3 developer and I don't know anything about the Skyrim engine, but it's well-known that the PS3 memory model can be a real PITA, and I can imagine this makes it very hard to get certain optimizations that work well on other systems to work on the PS3.

By the sound of it the problem isn't the size of the DLC download, but the size of the game state they're trying to keep in memory. The Xbox and PC architecture makes it easier to large game states in memory.

Mass Effect's Extended Cut is basically 100% video and sound content, though, which is why it's so big.

It's certainly less complex than any of the expansions to The Elder Scrolls series.

The PS3 version of Skyrim struggled to run when it was released. After 10 hours of game play the game would suffer crashes, slowdown and frame rate drops.

While these issues where patched later, its not surprising that the Dawnguard DLC which includes new animations that stress the XBox and low end PCs, when combined with existing PS3 issues would mean they can't get tit to work.

(this is mostly speculation and advanced hearsay) Skyrim already has weird problems on the PS3 like severe slowdowns that affect the late-game because the world state and the save file grows too much.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/06/fixing-skyrim-would-take-a...

Still, this is not a new problem - Las Vegas had it, Skyrim has it again. Its not like it hit them suddenly. I imagine that Dawnguard basically goes over the top in that regard. Still, it seems like they chose an implementation of a specific problem that does not address the specifics of a major target platform, which sucks.

No, this sounds like typical Bethesda. Their games have been the epitome of everything that's wrong in software development. I've yet to play a Bethesda game that wasn't a technical and bug-ridden nightmare, so much so that I've stopped supporting them entirely.

Their dev teams can't code themselves out of a paper bag. I'm not at all surprised that the PS3 is giving them serious troubles, given how it requires concurrent software to use all of the hardware (8 smaller cores over the Xbox's 3 larger ones, iirc).