When new consoles are announced, people want to know what it can do, and how powerful it is. While the typical consumer isn’t interested in RAM, GPU, or teraflops, hardcore games absolutely want to know what’s under the hood. Knowing the specs of a system empowers us to make a lot of predictions as to what it will be able to accomplish. Today we’re going to look at the teraflop, and what it does for a console’s power. Then we’ll look at the PS4 Pro’s specs, and why the PS5 will hit the fabled 8 (Actually 10.28) teraflops to play games in native 4K. Uh, Remind Me Again: What’s a Teraflop? The term “flop” refers to a floating point operation. This is a basic measurement of computational power. At the heart of both Sony and Microsoft consoles are chipsets manufactured by AMD. To calculate the teraflops of a console, you follow this formula: multiply the amount of shader cores by the clock-speed, then multiply that by two. That last step is to account for each clock (one multiply, one accumulate operation) that runs simultaneously. This will get you a huge number, so we divide that by one million and that will give us a teraflop measurement. Let’s look at an example, using the Xbox One and PS4: Xbox One: 768 shaders (x) 853MHz (x) 2 instructions per clock = 1,310,208 megaflops or 1.31 teraflops PS4: 1280 shaders (x) 800MHz (x) 2 instructions per clock = 1,843,200 megaflops or 1.84 teraflops So how does this apply to games as a whole? Well, we have to remember that teraflops are a very basic measurement and only apply to computational power. You have to consider several other factors before you can make a prediction on the performance of a machine. The software drivers and architecture of the GPU also contribute to the overall performance. It’s about efficiency as much as it is importance. On paper, for example, the PS4 Pro is 2.3x more powerful than the PS4, but a 40% increase in computational power doesn’t necessarily equal out to a 40% increase in performance. When it comes down to it, teraflops alone cannot define a console or PC’s performance. There are other factors like the GPU’s memory bandwidth that play into the equation. Thus far in the console war, the Xbox One’s 1.31 teraflops has been at a distinct disadvantage when compared to the PS4’s 1.84 teraflops. This is also a result of the Xbox One’s lower memory bandwidth. Developers have been very good at handling the difference in specs over the course of the generation, but we’ve seen resolutions swing wildly between the two consoles. What the PS4 runs in 1080p runs at 900p or lower on Xbox. The same situation may become the case with Xbox 2 (Project Scorpio) and PS4 Pro. Microsoft is targeting native 4K and 6 teraflops with their new console, but how they will manage that remains to be seen. There are some who believe that 6TF … Read More