The problem is how the engine stores way too much trivial information into memory when it should be removed when not needed. Both the PS3 and X360 are affected it just appears sooner on the ps3. The issue appears later on the 360 because the memory for the cpu and gpu are unified allowing the engine to eat away at the memory available for graphics. This causes more frequent framedrops, increasingly worse textures and object pop-in and eventually severe slowdown and freezes like on the PS3. What needs to be done is this tangential usage of memory needs to be dialed down. A possible solution instead of creating a complicated streaming engine is to partition the game world into regions and store persistent object data in different files outside of a save file. You would only load the persistent data from one region at a time thus reducing the memory footprint.

Or to have a better garbage collector to figure out what is no longer needed. Running out of memory is a RAM problem, in that it is using too much of it. Then again we already knew Bethesda were pushing what the 360 and PS3 could handle with their game, perhaps a few patches could improve garbage collection, I don't think regionalizing the entire world map is really all that feasible unless the map is already regionalized,

You should see some of the ridiculous [censored] they store in there.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1306304-in-ps3s-defense-ess-files-are-ridiculously-inefficient/

Its no so much what they save, but how they save it.

The title is in reference to the cause of the problem which in this case running out of memory is only a symptom. The fact that the game is playable until a certain amount of time shows the problem lies not in limitations of ram but an inefficient system built into the engine.


So if the save file is inefficiently stored but also loaded into memory for fast saving shouldn't the problems be fixed if
it was removed? A test was done where a larger save file that had slowdown was then loaded into a new game file
and the slowdown persisted. Yet the same new file loaded first after a restart had no issues.