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mantlepiecek on 17 October 2012
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fillet said:
mantlepiecek said:
walsufnir said:
mantlepiecek said:

Skyrim is most definitely lacking in video memory, not system memory.


What is your opinion based off? To me it's absolutely clear that Skyrim has strong demand of *main memory* because of the complexity this game has - the growing save-file has already been mentioned by another poster.

Skyrim isn't really doing anything other than rendering huge open world environments - something which requires a lot of GPU memory.

CPU memory is still a requirement of course. But I can't see why specifically skyrim will need more system memory compared to other games that perform loads better than it.


Incorrect. "Huge open worlds" take massive amounts of system memory, NOT GPU memory. Tricks are employed so that only visible data is rendered and lower resolution textures are used in distance etc. I can assure you right now 256MB for a render of ANY game at 720p is plenty, if you bolt on anti-aliasing then that will increase the amount required but that is something that can be tweaked after release.

The prequels to Skyrim also took massive amounts of memory, I remember Morrowind on the PC, it needed 1GB to be completely smooth without long pauses when going between invisible cut off points. That was from 20012002 ish. Then Oblivion, also needed a relatively high amount of system memory to run smoothly.

This is obviously a system memory issue. As the poster before me has mentioned, Skyrim is EXACTLY the type of game that needs large amounts of system memory. If you read between the lines and think it through it's the only logical answer. The real proof in the pudding is that if it were video memory limitations that were causing the hitching and slowdown - they could be fixed easily enough by employing industry standard tricks, draw distancefogging, lower res textures for distant objects, even close ones if it was really neeeded.

When there is a system memory shortage and the game has already been finished, it's very hard to do anything about it. When DLC comes that only adds to that burden....what can you do? Answer - not much!

GTA 4, Red Dead redemption, Just Cause 2, Fallouts  all of them, etc. All have ran well, with the exception of Fallout on some PS3s.

And out of them, just cause 2, and red dead redemption look great as well, probably better than PS3 skyrim anyway.

So if GPU isn't the one to blame, then all these games should technically require a lot of system RAM and should have been as bad as skyrim on PS3, and yet all of these only have one thing in common, they look worse than their 360 counterparts with fallouts also performing a tad worse.

I don't see how skyrim specifically requires more RAM.