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Comment by Eclyps | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the article is implying that the PS3 itself is too difficult to release DLC on... which I find to be a load of crap. There's plenty of good DLC coming out for other games. It just sounds like Bethesda developed the PS3 version as an afterthought and now can't manage the crappy code they wrote.

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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.

I don't think it's a Blu-Ray issue: Skyrim on the PS3 has a mandatory 5GB HDD install (roughly the size of the whole game), and the DLC would be on the HDD anyway.

The RAM constraints are the reason I'm eagerly looking forward to the next generation of consoles. When you're trying to cram fancier and flashier graphics into the same hardware every year, there are severe limitations in what else is possible in the game.

Give developers 4GB of RAM and better CPUs to play with, and we're going to see some more interesting cross-platform games.

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.

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