PlayStation 5 vs Xbox Series X: why teraflops aren’t everything

Sony and Microsoft recently announced the Specifications from their respective future consoles: PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

The Xbox X-series has been promoted by many as superior on paper because it has a higher teraflops (TFLOPS) performance than the PlayStation 5-12 compared to 10.28.

While you may assume that this means the X Series will be a better console than the PlayStation 5, this is not necessarily the case.

While teraflops are a good measurement standard, they don’t necessarily show how well a console will actually perform.

What is a teraflop?

To understand what a teraflop is, you must first understand what a floating point number is.

Floating point numbers include whole numbers, decimal point numbers, and even irrational numbers.

A floating point operation is a finite calculation that uses floating point numbers, unlike fixed point calculations, which only use integers.

This means that measuring a processor by the number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPS) it can execute per second is a more accurate way of calculating actual processor power than using only fixed point calculations.

A teraflop is a unit of measurement that represents the ability of a processor to calculate a trillion floating point operations.

This means that the X Series can process 12 trillion floating point operations per second, while the PlayStation 5 can process 10.28 trillion.

For a GPU, it is extremely important to be able to execute a large number of floating point operations, particularly given the implementation of new technologies such as ray tracing, which require the GPU to perform more operations.

Other elements to consider

Despite the fact that the use of teraflops is possibly the most accurate way to measure the power of the consoles, this in no way implies that the measurement standard is perfect.

In the context of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, there are other elements that also affect the actual performance of your console.

Loading times for gamers will also be important, and in this area the PlayStation 5 custom SSD offers 5.5GB / s of performance compared to the 4.8GB / s offered by the X Series.

Another element that influences performance is the GPU architecture as well as the GPU cache.

Even the software used by each console could have a significant impact on game performance.

The effect of clock frequencies.

Another element to consider is the ability of a GPU to operate at high clock frequencies.

On the PlayStation 5 keynote, chief architect Mark Cerny compared a 36CU GPU (control unit) that runs at 1GHz to a 48CU that runs at 750MHz.

Their argument was that a GPU with a lower CU count that has a higher clock speed would work better than the inverse, despite both being measured as offering 4.6 teraflops.

As highlighted by Notebook checkThe PlayStation 5 has a lower CU count than the X Series, but it has higher boost clock speeds.

This could cause the teraflops performance gap to narrow, or even narrow, in terms of real-world performance.

In the context of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, there are enough elements to consider that we cannot simply say that the X Series will perform better than the PlayStation 5 due to its higher teraflops specification.

The specifications of the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 are detailed below.

Xbox Series X vs PlayStation 5

Now Read: Xbox Series X vs. PlayStation 5 – Last Console Showdown