For those of you that don't know, the PS3 uses a special processor called the Cell Broadband Engine instead of a CPU like a Xbox or PC. The Cell Engine is made up of 8 micro-processors which are called SPE's; SPE's can be programmed to handle individual aspects of a game. For example, in Uncharted 2 there is a SPE programmed to handle physics, another might handle textures, another could handle AI.

However, this means more weeks of programming for the developers; so multi-platform games aren't 'optimised' for the PS3 whereas games like Gran Turismo, Killzone 2 and LittleBigPlanet that are PS3 exclusives have been 'optimised'. So, multi-platform games like Oblivion are using Cell Engine as a whole CPU; meaning that PS3 versions of games often fall below the standard of their Xbox 360 counterparts.

Do you think Bethesda would try to make use of the Playstation's unique processor?

Sounds good, but I doubt they would do this.

Probably not to any large degree. They may offload some processes to the cell's SPUs to make up for the PS3's limited memory capacity, but I doubt we'll see any heavy optimization.

Sure do hope, considering my 360 fried and I'm getting a Sony console for replacement. How much extra work would be involved though?

I don't see it happening, I mean what would be the point anyway?

If they did, whose to say it won't be done by 11/11/11?

there are 100 people who have been working for almost 5 years. So maybe they have. But i doubt it.

I don't know about that, but it would be nice if Bethesda makes use of the Cell's ability to do Anti-Aliasing [MLAA]. I started using it in Oblivion and Fallout: NV with 2x MSAA for a performance boost with still decent image quality on my laptop.

I'm pretty sure they do already. I mean, for Oblivion and Fallout 3 they used Havok for the physics, and Havok takes advantage of the SPEs.

Hopefully they'll offload the power intensive processes onto the SPE's, Oblivion became very stuttery and looked weird without anti-aliasing.




I have no idea how much work is involved, but maybe someone on these forums does.

Don't they pretty much have to? Despite Sony's marketing the PS3 is not that much more powerful than the Xbox 360. Its GPU is about the equivalent of the nVidia 7800 and without taking advantage of the Cell's architecture isn't the CPU actually inferior to that of the Xbox 360? The Xbox 360 has three general purpose CPU cores all able to do whatever is given to them equally. The PS3's are specialized so it's not like an eight core CPU. They have to specifically design around it, something that has resulted in inferior ports (one of the most notorious being the Orange Box) and it's something that drove up the costs of developing for the PS3 early on, one of the reasons Valve avoided the PS3 while its user base was smaller.

The PS3 also suffers from slow read speed with its Blu-ray drive. They actually duplicated data for Oblivion on the Blu-ray disc for the PS3 version to reduce load times, to put data in multiple locations so the drive could read it more easily when loading stuff. If they did that to overcome the PS3's drive speed limitations, they'd almost certainly take advantage of the Cell's architecture to make sure Skyrim on the PS3 doesn't end up being the clear least appealing option of the three platforms it is being released on.

As to a delay it wouldn't happen... this would have been planned for very likely several years ago.

I have a PS3, but I don't care. I would not play TES on a console. No mods, no in game console (something that got me out of a glitch once in Oblivion), and I can't imagine playing the game with a controller. I far prefer the keyboard and mouse for TES.