PS5 Teraflops: What Are They and How Many Does PlayStation 5 Have?

I watched a digital foundry video recently explaining it's not so much the tera flops but how efficient they are can also be a major factor!

Nice. I think TFlop is about GPU though right?
In other words it's only part of the equation for performance. Since 4k is easilly achievable with these consoles, maybe things like SSD and memory are more important.
I dont know anything, just trying common sense here 😊

talk to me when it hits 1.21 gigawatts and I can go back to the future!

What you are missing is that 1TF from 2013's GPU's is not as efficient as 1TF from a 2020 GPU. They have greatly improved efficiency and lowered latency too so the GPU's today are much more capable of doing more per TF. Digital Foundry reckon that the newer GPU's are about a third to 50% more efficient.

In other words, to get double the Pro, you don't need an 8.4TF GPU, more like 6.5-7TF. To get double the X, you need 9-10TF. The Series X, at 12TF, could well be more like 15/16TF if it was based on Polaris instead of RDNA2.

Most instructions are FP32 but the Pro can handle FP16 instructions which effectively 'double' the amount of instructions a GPU can do so the Pro could be 8.4TF if only FP16 instructions are used.

The calculation is quite basic. Its based on how many instructions a GPU can theoretically do per cycle and how many cycles per second (its speed). There are different ways of getting the same TF for example - higher number of instructions x lower number of Cycles or lower number of instructions x higher number of cycles. 40instructions at 2Ghz would give the same rating as 20instructions at 4Ghz.

Its not taking into account any latency between sending/receiving instructions for example or efficiency gains - its purely a theoretical number as a guide but really shouldn't be used to compare different generations because other factors impact real world results - like latency and efficiency of the system as a whole.

Also a like for like comparison in the numbers doesn't paint the whole picture as the new architecture is more efficient, so whilst its technically double what the Xbox One X has and nearly 3 times the Pro, in real world performance the gains will be even higher.

RDNA 2.0 hasn't even being revealed in the PC space yet and in pure numbers this puts Xbox inline with the Nvidia 2080 super. This coupled with Variable rate shading and of course ray tracing means this is going to be one hell of a console.

Now we just have to wait and see where Sony are with estimates putting it around the 9.2tflops range

Since we are talking about TFLOPs, Microsoft's GPU specs put it just about on par with the Nvidia 2080 Ti (13.4TFLOPs).

I'll direct you to @BAMozzy comment regarding TFLOPs, but it's safe to say the console will be no slouch in the GPU department.

Knowing about where the GPU power falls by PC comparison is exciting as it means no compromises from the developers. Though, even though AMD is the lower-priced manufacturer compared to Nvidia, I am worried about the price of Series X.

@M1359 We were focused on "bits" back then.

the current Xbox has quite a few flops, it's very sad

Thats a lot of flops.nba players will be proud😁.xbox. Will definitely flops.ps5 reigns supreme at 14 teraflops.word ☝ up son

@M1359 Not really. If that were the case, they'd stop making new consoles and just stick to NES. Plenty of great games made there and plenty more could be made even now.

But power is far from meaningless for most gamers. There are exceptions, but that's all they are. Exceptions.

@M1359 So there were no crap games when Super Metroid was out? And we still get great games now. There maybe more rubbish games released now because so many games get shoved out. Power is not the be all and end all for gaming, just one of many factors that can lead to making a good game.

I'm more interested in how many bit ps5 has 😃

@M1359 While I understand where you are going with your sentiment - powerful hardware won't make a rubbish game suddenly great - I do think that something like Super Metroid is great because the power boost allowed developers to do more with the game than what could ever be done on original NES - more music variety, more enemies on screen, better music, better color palette, more complex environments, etc. So power does matter in that it provides bandwidth help build a better game.

I do agree that people put a lot of stock in seeing these kinds of numbers - it's mostly advertising speak to get people to justify purchasing the new system over another system. It keeps things simple without getting too far into the weeds.

For me, even if the PS5 is slightly weaker or stronger, I still plan to get a PS5 and a Series X. The PS5 will probably be the "exclusives machine" since I have Game Pass Ultimate subscription until like March 2022.

@OscarHTX that's why MS is eager to let you know how fast their machine is. They have Zero exclusives like any of those. In fact I can't think of a single Xbox game I would like to play. Surely that would change over the next gen, but Sony doesn't need to prove anything.

If a game is limited to 30fps because of GPU - having to render all that detail, long draw distances, lighting and all those effects, doubling the GPU will help to hit 60fps. Its not just about 'resolution' as games are in motion - meaning that every frame has to be rendered within a certain time. At 30fps, the entire system has 33ms to produce the next frame but only 16.6ms to render the exact same quality image at 60fps - meaning it has to work twice as fast to produce 1 frame.

As far as I am aware, most people would prefer 60fps as standard - that was evident with the Pro and many people wanting 1080/60 instead of higher resolutions and 30fps. Whilst the GPU is certainly more than double the PS4, the CPU however was not - boosting the speed to 3.2Ghz would have been needed to get double the performance but the Pro's CPU was only a third faster (2.1Ghz) so the CPU couldn't do twice the work (or the same work in just half the time).

Graphics are the 'first' impression we get of a game and first impressions count. Obviously by the time it releases, other things matter too but a game can be made or broken on its reveal based on how it looks. There have been numerous games that have 'disappointed' because the graphics were not as good as the initial reveal looked and angered people or you get the opposite where games look mediocre and people write off the game before its even released. Graphics do affect peoples decisions - often more so than game-play because first impressions count. Not everyone of course but it does affect a lot. People will buy a 'mediocre' game because it looks good and have a higher expectation on AAA games. Long term sales may well be governed by game-play as word of mouth and reviews help but initial sales can suffer if a game doesn't look great.

I am not saying Graphics are the 'most' important but they do play a significant role in gaming. It draws people in and helps create these worlds we want to spend time in, take photos of and share, brings characters to life etc. Its not just resolutions, but animations, facial expressions, realistic lighting/reflections etc that bring a world to life...

The leaks regarding the XsX being 12 flops was legit, and as much as I don't want to be THAT guy, the leak about the current rumoured PS5 being 'only' 9.2 was completely left out of the article.
Now I know that's no slouch and it's still very early days but if it IS true, then they might be scurrying around trying scrape another flop or two to appease the spec crowd. I know, how bizarre, some folks buy a console based on the specs and not the games available for it!!
I don't expect Sony to be too far away but I simply cannot see them being on the same level as this thing. It'll be a £699 beast, with a lower powered model at £399 I reckon. Thoughts folks?

PS4 (Standard): 1.84 teraflops
PS4 Pro: 4.2 teraflops
Xbox One (Standard): 1.31 teraflops
Xbox One S: 1.4 teraflops
Xbox One X: 6 teraflops

X1 is about $300 now and if it's TFLOPs double from 6 to 12 could we be looking at a doubling of price? Taking all the other improvements into account as well. A $600 XSX.

If a $300 PS4 Pro is about $300 now, would Sony need to triple the price to get it from 4 to 12 TFLOPs? Maybe there's a reason those rumours say 9.2, Sony didn't want to price themselves out of the market trying to get to 12.

I know there is a lot more than TFLOPs to the price but I would think it should cost MS less to double the power of X1 than it cost Sony to triple the power of PS4 Pro. Sony only doubling the power of Pro might help them keep the price competitive.

Quality content is better than an over powered console with nothing much going for it, Xbox X I'm looking at you.

Remember when the power conversation was about gigs of ram? Now it’s teraflops.

@Neolit have you tried RDR2 on the X? There is a huge difference between that and the Pro version. In my mind I was definitely thinking PS5 at launch but those specs have made me think twice, especially now I know that if I bought Cyberpunk on the One X then I'll get the Series X version whenever its released. Now this may well be the case with PS5 but Xbox are also promising enhancements to our current games too

@beavis64 Are gigs of ram not that important anymore compared to teraflops?

Be even more impressive if they announced an SSD with alot of space to accommodate for these bigger better games that are Guna inevitably be huge in terms of the amount of space they're Guna take up on the ssd

@beavis64 yeah I mean I'll probably end up with both anyway, this gen PS4 obviously had the better exclusives but there were a few I enjoyed on Xbox too and of course Halo is meant to be a launch game. A big thing for me will be backwards compatibility and if PS5 can play PS1 and PS2 games for example, just by putting the disc in then that becomes a no brainer at launch for me and while everyone is playing the Demon Souls remake in 4K, I'll be playing Die Hard Trilogy and Syphon Filter 😂

@beavis64 I am too. It will be interesting to see what these studios are able to do with the new hardware as well. I do hope to see some bold new direction for existing IP as well as some actual new IP's. One thing Microsoft really needs are good story-tellers. It could use it's own "Naughty Dog".

It is nice to know that multi-platform developers won't have to make many (if any) compromises to the PC versions with the Series X (and hopefully PS5 as well). It not only benefits the gamers, but also has potential to speed up development time since it will take a lot less to get the games running on the new hardware (even if it's only by a few months).

16-bit with blast processing is better than any teraflop.

It's all about that SSD!

@Dan_ozzzy189
I think ps5 GPU will be between 8 and 13TF.
🧐
I'm sure I wont even see the difference either way haha

Regarding the leak DF is also referring to, you never know. Could be the same or could be a different GPU. (There was no Ray Tracing in that leak) or could be BC test with disabled CUs

@rjejr - it's not overly relevant. the switch's GPU is ~400Gflops, which is less than 10% of PS4 pro.. but PS4 pro isn't $3000. PS5/XBSX will be using chips/architecture from an entirely different family compared to the PS4pro/XB1X, unrelated to how much they're 'boosted' from the old SoCs. teraflop is not really a very accurate indicator of what a GPU is actually capable of. comparing teraflops from tensor cores with traditional cuda/gcn/rdna cores for example is fairly meaningless. a tensor core does 4x4 tensor (matrix) calculations per cycle.

@leucocyte Thanks for the info. I wouldn't compare the price of a Switch to a PS4 though, you're paying for different stuff there. A PS4 to a PS4 Pro to a PS5 you're looking at 1 console to the next to the next.

At some point in the next 6 or 7 months, preferably sooner, we should have all the prices and specs then history will be the judge.

i have a hunch ps5 will be less powerful (maybe around 10TF) but at least $100 cheaper than the xbox. that is a good compromise. won't make a lick of difference in performance. if you can make a game as beautiful as uncharted 4 or god of war on 1.8TF, i honestly don't need much more than that. i will gladly play at 1080p/60 for the rest of my life and be completely satisfied with it so long as there is great art direction and attention to detail.

@M1359 Imagine if Microsoft called the next Xbox the "Xbox 12" because it has 12 teraflops. Stupid right? Because that's exactly what Nintendo did with the N64 and its 64 bits. Imagine how awful it'd be if loads of Xbox Series X games had a 12 at the end of their name, like Halo 12 and Gears 12 because of teraflops, like Mario 64 and Goldeneye 64 did with bits.

They've always been focused on this kind of stuff. Sega also went on about blast processing and the SNES had the Super FX chip and Mode 7.

You can't say "teraflop" it's called flops because it's short for "FLoating point Operations Per Second" so writing "flop" would be the same as "FLoating point Operations Per"

I registered just to post but I also saw the name of this website while doing so and I realized why this article spoke nothing of the rumored PS5 specs (and the fact that the same "leaker" reported the PS5 at around 9 TFLOPS.

Nothing against anyone here but the website obviously has a bias. The difference in performance here isn't NOT significant and during the early days of ps4 vs Xbox one the story was always about how much better ps4 ran x game or the fact that ps4 was at true 1080p while xbox one had to "settle" for 900p or even less.

The point I'm making is the difference in power at that time was even less than what we have here and though you may tell yourself "oh I don't care I'll always be just as happy with 1080p".

Well you may feel this way but those early reports and differences in performance are a bias that moves a lot of non "fanboy" types to wherever their games play best.

360 lost tons of users during the transition because of this. And all it takes its a friend's groups early adopter making this decision before long the rest of that group follows him.

I know the response it's about the games, games games, but this is only now because the tables are turned when it was the other way around it was all about how much better games were on ps4.

Now those exclusives absolutely do matter but no one is taking into account the fact that Microsoft hasn't even began to show their hand in this regard and even if the PS4 had all the games you "had" to play it can easily change.

I felt the same way about ps4 exclusives and still own a ps4 pro (and 0 Xbox) but go back a generation and I couldn't care less about Sony's exclusives and everything I wanted to play was on 360.

Just keep all this in mind the Xbox being more powerful out the gate matters (it isn't insignificant its almost 33% more power) and though you say you don't care about high fidelity gaming that may be true today but 5 years from now you may not be so much.

1080p is fine when all you know is 1080p but wait til you can't get a 1080p screen (1080p on a 4k screen leaves a lot to be desired).

Every system has its exclusives and those maybe all some gamers care about but the casual "COD or NBA guys" could care less about them and they'll just go where everyone else is and those people will go where their early adopter friends go and if those early adopters go with the most powerful console (like they've done before).

It all will matter.

They have to be quite similar for dev to makes games on they are going to be power houses. But it's the quality of games that matters really exclusives as well.

I'm not technically minded, but I listened as carefully as I could and the best analogy I could think is ps5 is a pint glass and x1sx is a wine bottle. The wine bottle is bigger holds more but which one can you drink from faster or pour out faster?

My friend studied higher level maths and tried to explain irrational numbers to me... Suppose it makes sense, but never considered it being applied to consoles.

@KidBoruto so no buy?

How big is a flop?

@KidBoruto Just bough sata3 ssd (samsung evo 860 2tb) for my pc at about $380, I can assure you that 2tb nvme pcie 4.0 will be way more expensive, unless there's $700 ps5 2tb edition lol.

probably worth stating as digital foundry did that a teraflop isn't a benchmark for comparing actual performance 🙄

@M1359 maybe but the majority of gamers now could not even look at xxx whatever game you mention its that irrelevant

Xbox Series X has 12.16 TFLOPs NOT a flat 12. If you're going to use the decimal places, use it for all machines... -_-

And with both machines used RDNA 2, the TFLOP figures are mostly directly comparable in terms of judging general GPU performance. Xbox has a GPU power advantage this generation, that's just a cold, hard fact. Just like the PS5 having a better SSD.

@KidBoruto You'll be waiting for loong time, I think ps4 pro still priced at $400 and ps4 slim at $300, there's no way I can wait for about 6 years to play ps5 lol.

Something I haven't see. Discussed is that the XSX's 12TF is an accurate reading - the GPU and CPU run at locked clock speeds, so you can expect that to be a totally accurate measurement.

The PS5's GPU runs at a fluctuating clock speed just like desktop AMD RDNA GPUs. They claim it boosts as high as 2.23GHz, which is how they get a little over 10TF, but there's no way that's a sustained speed. It likely boosts up to 2.23GHz for a few seconds to keep to a stable framerate, prevent dips, but I'm willing to bet it runs more like 2GHz normally. I'm expecting it to be more like 9TF normally, with boosts up to 10TF as-needed before it gets too hot and has to dip back down.

The XSX absolutely wins in terms of GPU. I expect XSX games that run at 4K 120FPS to be 4K 60FPS or 1440p-1800p 120FPS on the PS5, and the PS5 will have, I dunno, one second loading times while the XSX has two second loading times. xD

Both good pieces of hardware, gonna be incredible values. All I care about is backwards-compatibility. My PS3 gets way more use than my PS4, but I got an XB1S when I learned they had back-compat all the way back to their original Xbox. I'm planning on going XSX for the best experience on my 4K 120Hz TV, even got a forward-compatible Xbox Elite 2 controller ahead of time for it, and the only way I'm gonna rush to get a PS5 is if I can play my PS1 and PS2 Classics on it.

Microsoft said the entire Xbone library will be playable on the XSX, and Sony said they're gonna gradually add support for PS4 titles... big oof. At the end of the day, I'm gonna end up getting both systems, but I really wish the PS5 would let me play the oldies. ;~;

The PS5 has always been 9.2 it may be able to boost to 10+ for a few milliseconds but it's been clear from the hardware presentation that around 9 was more realistic.

@TooBarFoo Seems accurate. PS5 seems to do 1800p where XBOX SX does 4k. 3k vs 4k or 9tf vs 12tf. +33% pixel density advantage, +33% gpu power advantage. Plus Xbox has more RDNA2 features. I got the PS5 despite the power disparity and hopefully this decision pays off for me and especially Sony's sake. I know it's not that big of a difference, but seeing the PS5 do 25% worse in resolution does bother me especially for cross-gen titles.

@JJ2 Nope, that's just a made-up term.