How will the loading times be in skyrim? I think the loading in both Fallout and Oblivion is HORRIBLE at some times.

What do you mean by loading times? Do you mean in general or between cities and wilderness and such?

They will take at least take 3 minutes each.

Well I suppose it's because I'm a PC gamer but my load times are almost instant, as in within 3 seconds, even when I'm first loading up the game or entering the market district.. My laptop is pretty good though so I guess people with old PCs or Laptops would get slower times.

Are you talking about console load times or something? If so I doubt they will be much better.

What are load times like on the consoles?

Loading times (short) will be between interiors > exteriors.

Hopefully none in exteriors themselves. Nowadays, from what I've heard, a thread is usually used for the sole purpose of handling background resources; eliminating loading times.

I′m going to play the game on a 360 just as I did with Oblivion and Fallout. And I mean the loading time in general, sometimes it was really fast and sometimes it was totally horrible.

Well, it's loading more data from the same device, so...
Installing to your HDD will help, moreso on the PS3 where you can buy a decently fast drive without having to pay the insane MS pricing, but there's really no way of getting around the fact that it's a lot of data to load, and a hard drive isn't a very fast storage system. On PC there's the RAM to cache more stuff, and generally faster drives, but loading isn't really something you can make faster in software, you max the read speed of your primary medium long before using all your processing power.

How can we posibly answer this question when there's still 10 months of development left?

Uhh because the game can't be pushed much further than it was in Oblivion?

The consoles are 5 years old, they aren't going to magically load the game faster than Oblivion did.. it's perfectly reasonable to expect similar load times, most likely slightly worse though.

Well the game in using a new engine, not the same one like oblivion did (Oblivion loading times on xbox was a big pain for me ) and I think we cant answer this question until we see the game in action.

Yes, we can. No matter how efficient your software is, there is a physical limit to how fast you can read data from a specific disk. You simply cannot load large amounts of data from a slow medium quickly, there's just no way around that.

In my opinion the loading times might be a bit more optimized this time around, but the limiting factor will be the hardware the game is played on. I foresee practically no loading times during big transitions because I will be playing the game from a SSD and a supercomputer that will have ridiculous data transfer rates. But older hardware will have longer loading times as they can only transfer so much data in so much time. :shrug:

So maybe Bethesda will have a form of background preloading during zone transitions in order to reduce visible loading times; but we'll just have to see how it goes...

Read what the guy said below.. it hits the nail on the head perfectly.



It is not a engine limitation or a software limitation, it's because the hardware in the 360/PS3 is 5 years old. PS3s load time can be improved because you can get faster hard drives but 360 users are stuck with very slow hard drives and 512mb of RAM(A very, very, VERY small amount for the people who aren't aware)

Load times will only be worse, not better. Oblivion load times were as good as the 360 would let them be.

If you want fast load times in Skyrim and you have a full time job and some cash lying around, why not invest in a gaming PC? These days you can get gaming PCs much cheaper than you would think, you also have the bonus of increased graphics and of course, mods (I would not think about playing a Bethesda game without mods, they bring so much immersion and life to the games.. they are amazing)

For $500-$800 you can a pretty darn decent gaming PC that will easily be able to play Skyrim on medium-high graphics(Consoles play the game at low-medium graphics, at least Oblivion/Fallout did) and have much, much faster load times than consoles ever would have.. Sure it's more expensive than a console but if you have a full time job that sort of money really isn't anything to worry about.

Right now, we can only guess at this. I'm hoping that the new engine will be better optimized than Oblivion, and load more quickly, but I won't get my hopes up too high. I could see the loading times being similar to Oblivion, or possibly worse, due to having more data that needs to be proccessed as a result of the technical improvements, but like I said, it will depend a lot on how well programmed the engine is, I've seen games that look better than Oblivion but load quicker (Of course, the large amounts of mods I'm using with Oblivion, some of them likely fairly resource intensive, probably don't help to cut down on my loading times anyway.) but like I said, it probablty depends on the engine.

Of course, I don't know how loading times were on the PS3 and Xbox 360 anyway, but I'll take your word for it that they were bad. As for the PC version, obviously, it's going to depend a lot on the user's system, though even on the same hardware, the loading times might be different from Oblivion's as well.



Then I think the important question is, how much of the loading times Oblivion players experienced on consoles came from the software optimization and how much from the limitations of the hardware? And that's a question I don't know the answer to.

I'm guessing it will be similar to Oblivion.

Luckily it's a very easy question to answer, and I can do it using your PC as an example. Unless you have a very, very fast storage method, you can process the data you're reading from your disk orders of magnitude faster than you can actually read it. With DDR3 RAM, you can read or write 16GB (likely more, but I don't know anybody with more RAM to test) of data in a few nanoseconds - for reference, hard drive seek times (As in, the time as it moves the read head to where it can start reading data) are measured in *milliseconds*. Hard drives are much faster than standard DVDs, and while a blu-ray drive can reach speeds around 400mb/s on the outer rim, consider how damn fast 16GB/ns is. The only way you can load faster is by loading less data, because the disk is so much of a bottleneck that your other resources basically have nothing to do.

While both consoles have significantly slower RAM than DDR3, we're still talking millions, or possibly billions depending on how slow DVD actually is, of times the performance of the primary storage.

Newer games exploit newer hardware, and so they run less well on older kit, if at all.

Skyrim on 2011 machines will run as well as Oblivion on 2006 machines, but with more detail, and better AI, and... Load times will be similar, because more data will be coming from faster devices. The developers will use all the extra capability of the hardware to make the game better, or you'll all complain. So if you run on older hardware, you'll all complain. Whatever happens, you'll all complain.

Yes my alias is "The Complainer" and im like a superhero


No but I think they can make the loading so it will have a better "flow" (sorry my bad eng) than Oblivion. Just Cause 1 & 2 is VERY big and have no loading times if I can remember it right

The load times were very much hardware driven on Morrowind/Oblivion. As the years have gone on and I have upgraded my PC the load times have gotten shorter and shorter. In Morrowind the loadbar barely has time to appear. In Oblivion it's gotten faster but not quite to the speed of Morrowind yet which makes sense (there's a lot more going on!). Both of these games were built with the Gamebryo engine so this explains why they have this similarity.

However, Skyrim has been built using a brand new custom engine built by Bethesda. We have no precedent to gauge how well it will perform with certain tasks like this. For all we know it could be better or worse. We wont know until a video is shown or the devs or anyone that's seen the game choose to share this info with us.

How much did that laptop cost you?

By large I don't expect any longer than standard load times. Obviously actually yes by softwore and optimization the load times are most likely -a little- better. The disk does play a large factor but not absolute as I can see it. To be fair Oblivions were standard for the time. 3 and New Vegas were pushing it.

I don't expect load times to be longer then industry standards. Obviously for say 360 users a disk install can help a lot with cutting down load times. But yeah, standard load times. No more than Fallout 3, maybe a little less. Think Mass Effect 2 load times.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1165559-is-the-creation-engine-actually-a-new-engine-at-all/

Saw this in another thread, not sure if it's true though: "Just wondering, from what I am reading, and what I am seeing, the "Creation Engine" for all intents appears to be a moderately modified Gamebryo engine."

No, the disk pretty much is the entire limiting factor. It sounds like hyperbole, but to say that RAM is billions of times faster than a standard speed HDD isn't even exaggerating. It's not that drives are slow per se, it's a pretty much unavoidable consequence of using the rotation of physical objects to store your data, when you're processing that data with transistors on the order of 40 or 50nm where the limiting factor is quickly becoming the speed of an electron, it's easy to see where the issue is. SSDs are pretty damn fast, but even loading from an SSD, the SSD is your limiting factor. It's very hard to load data inefficiently these days.

Ah. Admittedly all a guess on my part from a topic where basically we talked about disc formats and their hinderances and pros. Heavily on DVD.

Valid points but generally speaking we shouldn't see much worse speeds than Oblivion or New Vegas no? Of coarse if load times could be easily lowed most people would enact it. Still there should be a -bare- improvement even if not much to note or care about.


Also to the other guy posting. Could be a heavily modifiied Gamebryo engine. Seeing as the guys behind it sunk and the engine hasn't seen an update in years compared to say the Unreal Engine by Epic I doubt it. Their probably taking some code from it plus the technical aspects built up over the years.

But yes it probably is a brand new engine as they say. Gamebryo's infrastructure couldn't handle much more. And overhauling it would be one hell of an effort.