Oblivion on 360 gets another patch thanks to PS3 development.

[Cheezdoodles]

The worst section I've noticed is anything to do with Chorrol town. It takes upwards of five minutes to load the town itself and moving between sections means going out to make a cup of tea. Weird thing is that I think its only been this bad with my current character.

Clear your X360 cache

 

[Nick Laslett]

Oblivion is a great game.

But it sure had a lot of gameplay bugs in the Xbox360 version.

I hope they have done something about that for the PS3.

It does rather kill you will to continue when certain bugs happen.

 

[nintenho]

Bethesda/1up response since I know nothing:

Amazing games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion are chugging along once PS3 owners try to load as much downloadable content they can get their mitts on. Why you ask? Well that's because the PS3 has limitations in memory and bandwidth.

In fact, according to a show from 1up.com, Bethesda claimed that unlike the PC and 360 versions, there won't be much of anything, including horse armor. 1up had a few words with Bethesda. While they're hard at work to bring Oblivion out this 2007, they had a few gripes with the PS3. Bethesda had this to say:

It's a technical limitation. They just don't have enough memory to load every piece of downloadable content. They tried it, did some work-arounds, but the performance isn't there. They hope to have some, but they're going to have some, but they're going to have to pick and choose...

But since the Xbox 360 and the PS3 both have 512 MB of memory, PS3 people have been saying that there is no difference. Apparently there is. According to TheTjalian, the PS3 has 512 MB of memory, but it's divided into two: 256 MB for the system, 256 MB reserved for textures. The 360, in contrast, uses around 350 MB or more for textures and the rest for the system - however there is no system-imposed limit.

It seems that the same technologies that makes the PS3 stand out is the same reason it's not performing well. Hint? Two words: CELL, RSX. In an investigation by hardware gurus at Anandtech, they had something to say:

The downside to the RSX using the Cell for all vertex processing is pretty significant. Remember that the RSX only has a 22.4GB/s link to its local memory bandwidth, which is less than 60% of the memory bandwidth of the GeForce 7800 GTX. In other words, it needs that additional memory bandwidth from the Cell’s memory controller to be able to handle more texture-bound games.

Yikes! So even while the RSX G70 monster inside the PS3 is better than a GF 7800 GTX, it can't quite give its all to the system. It's like getting an elephant through a crevice - okay, okay, not that an elephant would make a great video card and all. And the Xbox 360 is not without it's own hiccups and mishaps. And the PS3 does perform on par with the 360, even with the limitations considered.

You'd think that MS and Sony would get both sides of the cake right: offer bleeding edge tech and perform at maximum capability. Unfortunately, we'll have to see another generation of Xbox and Playstation to know just where they're going with next-gen concepts.

http://boards.1up.com/zd/board/message?board.id=show&message.id=98453

not my reason, their's.

 

[Bobbler]

Bethesda/1up response since I know nothing:

http://boards.1up.com/zd/board/message?board.id=show&message.id=98453

not my reason, their's.

That post (seems from some random person?) is sort of devoid of content.

It doesn't tell us anything -- it mentions a bunch of generic information (which is only partially correct) and nothing informative from Bethesda. I definitely doesn't look like a response from 1up or Bethesda.

Just curious, what made this post seem like it was notable, Nintenho? Maybe I missed it, but it seems like a random post from a normal forumite which explains nothing and only reinforces the current confusion with pseudo-information.

 

[nintenho]

I don't know but I tried asking in another thread and nobody from 1up answered so the best response was what I assume is a press release.

Might be from an admin if they can make a new thread about it?

 

[chroniceyestrain]

That sure doesn't look like a response from Bethesda or 1up.

 

[swanlee]

Is it that hard to believe that the PS3 is having some issues due to the split memory design? Also the interview says you cannot load all DL content at the same time due to memory issues it doesn't say they aren't going to make it available just you have to pick and choose what you load at ONE time.

When you start a game of oblivion at the menu screen it pauses for a second and then says LOADING ADDITIONAL CONTENT, this is loaded into memory so when playing you have access to all the DL content in your game, if the PS3 has less system memory to load all of this content it's going to cause problems which is what is happening here with the PS3.

The solution is at the menu screen they are probably going to make you choose what content you load into memory, you can DL all the content you want but you can only play so much of it at a time.

It doesn't seem like it's that hard to understand, it's funny people second guessing the devs on this they know more than any of you do about this issue.

 

[Todd33]

investigation by hardware gurus at Anandtech

I had to stop there, some random shmo on their forums? You have to love the net, people pretend to be experts and all the hack tech sites quote them like it's gospel.

So in other words we still don't know what the real reason is.

 

[Tap In]

So in other words we still don't know what the real reason is.

I'm pretty sure we have been able to deduce a few of the distinct possibilities.

1) RAM.

 

[Todd33]

I'm pretty sure we have been able to deduce a few of the distinct possibilities.

1) RAM.

Video or system? What is it about DLC that makes it different from the actual game? It defies logic IMO.

 

[Darkon]

ps3 oblivion owners are going to get micro transaction raped i'm pretty sure of that .

 

[scooby_dooby]

Video or system? What is it about DLC that makes it different from the actual game? It defies logic IMO.

No it's pretty simple logically actually. They do not expect huge sales for the PS3 version, therefore the budget for workarounds and porting is very small, given the small budget they decided not to do the workarounds required to deal with PS3's split memory pool, instead just cutting the content that couldn't fit in available ram.

It's either that, or PR, but I can't see a good reason why they would not offer the DLC if there was no technical problem. It's certainly not because Sony is not letting them charge users. Perhaps it's simply a problem with the Sony Online infrastructure which is probably fairly immature still.

 

[swaaye]

Heh. How oximoronic. For "free" on 360. I was under the impression that the game ran horribly on 360, ignoring the cache issues no less. A 15% fps loss would show up as 1 fps if it's crawling already.

 

[aselto]

Heh. How oximoronic. For "free" on 360. I was under the impression that the game ran horribly on 360, ignoring the cache issues no less. A 15% fps loss would show up as 1 fps if it's crawling already.

I played it in December and it hardly ever dropped frames. Maybe some updates improved the game's performance. Tha game on 1up show seemed very smooth, too. I don't imagine that Oblivion could run at 7fps as you suggest.

 

[Pete]

Bethesda/1up response since I know nothing:

http://boards.1up.com/zd/board/message?board.id=show&message.id=98453

not my reason, their's.

That post didn't make a whole lot of direct sense, other than to allude to the fact that the PS3 might reserve more memory for the OS and that might be the limitation. Not sure what vertex processing and bandwidth has to do with it.

If RAM is the issue, and they can't use the HD as an intelligent pre-buffer of sorts, then I wonder if HDR is further hampering memory use? For instance, if, in addition to giving a little more up to the OS, the PS3 "loses" yet more to FP16 (rather than FP10). I don't know how AA (is the 360's EDRAM like an extra 10MB?) or rendered res (are they fixed at 720p, or can they render lower, like I hear of some 360 games, and scale to 720p at the end?) factors into this, either.

 

[Bad_Boy]

Has there been any examples of multiplatform DLC yet?

 

[TheChosenOne]

New IGN Preview

There is a new preview of the PS3 version up on IGN along with new screens.

Click Here



Looks like the PS3 version gets faster load times and fewer instances of slowdown than the 360 version.

 

[Pete]

The last two paragraphs are the relevant ones in that IGN preview. Some choice quotes:

Entering dungeons or buildings results in a load of 3-5 seconds, compared to the 7-10 seconds or longer for the 360 version of the game. Similarly, the amount of framerate drops or hitches that cropped up in the wilderness as you accessed a new area on the 360 have been substantially reduced on the PS3 version. ...

The visual presentation of Oblivion has also been significantly enhanced. ... While it was a beautiful title on the 360, far off environmental details often displayed low resolution textures. This has been fixed with new shaders dedicated to rendering the foreground cleanly with sharper details, so rocky landscapes now have craggy appearances instead of smooth, non-distinct surfaces. While there is still a fair amount of pop-in that occurs (which can't be helped due to the size of the world), the draw distance is farther than the 360 version.

So, they've reduced load times, nice, but the most interesting part is they've simultaneously improved streaming in new data while upgrading to "much sharper" textures. Very promising, and seemingly very at odds with the current speculation of insufficient RAM (though IGN confirms that not all eight of the "plug-ins", a k a extra content, will ship at launch, they don't say if it's a system limitation).

 

[Tap In]

Looks like the PS3 version gets faster load times and fewer instances of slowdown than the 360 version.

well I'd hope so considering it was a year ago since it was first released.

 

[rounin]

well I'd hope so considering it was a year ago since it was first released.

I thought we all learned that porting to a new architecture is not exactly trivial. Getting the same quality shouldn't be taken for granted, and getting better than the original within this timeframe deserves praise. Granted, for low-caliber games, it can be arguable, but for a game the Xbox360 owners have been raving about as a technical feat for so long, and one that has won RPG of the year awards, its something admirable.

Besides, with all the negativity facing Xbox360 to PS3 ports lately from certain members of the forum, and in particular the doubts put on the BR drive's loading times, this is a welcome change of pace.