Is my save playable again? This is the question PS3 owners will be asking themselves as they slot their Skyrim disc back in and download the latest patch.
Patch 2.03 – equivalent to 1.04 on other platforms – sets out to make amends for the severe bouts of stuttering that plague Skyrim’s playability on Sony’s console. Notoriously, this has had a greater impact on those with a larger time investment in the adventure, with performance deteriorating the further players progress and the more they interact with the world and its characters.
As detailed in our previous dissection of the phenomenon, the catch with this bug is that it has little to do with the hardware’s graphical output; a new save running on the same patch, and through the exact same areas, manifests no such problems. A memory management issue stemming from larger-sized save files, and issues with the PS3′s more restrictive split-RAM setup, were assumed the most probable causes at the time, with no absolute explanation being put forward so far. Bethesda’s knee-jerk response to the problem last year arrived by way of patch 2.01, where some improvements were made, although the stuttering still persisted to an unacceptable level.
