Why are Tflops so important all of a sudden?

I've been reading through the new specs on both the Neo and Scorpio and the main spec that is being shouted about is Tflops. Neo has 4 Tflops and Scorpio has 6 Tflops and I’m struggling to see how relevant this spec is even after the explanation given on the Beastcast a couple weeks ago.

For example the AMD Fury x has 8.6 Tflops but the 980ti has 5.63 Tflops but yet the 980ti out performs the Fury X almost everywhere bar from a few Direct X 12 titles and in some 4K situations.

Same goes with the memory bandwidth which is the other spec being thrown around, the Fury X has 512 GB/s and the 980ti had 336GB/s yet the Fury x is not out pacing the 980ti.

So if these specs are so important all of a sudden then why is the Fury X not destroying the 980ti? Is it because games are not being optimizes for this specs or is it because the Nvidia just has a stronger architecture in which case these specs are useless to me and you.

I should add that it’s not that Tflops is a new thing (because I know it’s not) I just don't know why it has been selected as the poster spec for these new consoles (when they haven’t been hugely important in the past) over something that’s more commonly known like Polaris or Vega architecture, which is something more understandable and interesting to me and no doubt other gamers both in the PC and Console space.

I think this is just you being new to this. As far as GPUs and their Giga/teraflops marketing bullshit it has been a thing for a long time and its still not important if you know what they are talking about.

How many Watts do your loudspeaker have, how many megapixels is that camera etc. etc.

Big fancy numbers help sell things.

Good question.

Last time I remember hearing about those was back when Folding@Home came out on PS3.

This whole thing seems really misguided in my opinion.
This teraflops and 4K gaming thing is being pushed hard all of a sudden.
Can we please just instead aim for consistent 1080p/60fps on all releases? That would be a nice, reasonable goal.

Teraflops are theoretical max of floating point operations that hardware can do in a second. They are more useful in comparing hardware now than something like CPU clock speeds or "bits". However their main use outside of scientific applications is for marketing and in marketing you can bend the numbers in many ways to your benefit.

Influencers.

It gives you a rough estimate of power and is easy to market like others who mentioned megapixels. The plus side is that what the new Xbox is packing opens up the possibility for native 4k gaming and PC quality VR. As for the execution we won't know till it releases.

Things said by people who don't understand what Tflops actually are, but argue anyway because the numbers are bigger.

@charlie_victor_bravo: by pushing for 4k gaming, higher framerates at 1080p begin to become the norm on the stronger hardware.

60 FPS is never going to be the standard on consoles. There will always be developers that choose to target 60 FPS, but the majority will continue to use all the processing power at their disposal to jam in the most impressive visuals with the biggest number of things on screen at an acceptable framerate rather than scale back the visuals to achieve 60 FPS.

Unless consoles get to a point where they are so powerful that there's enough headroom for maxed out PC level visuals and 60 FPS, most developers will choose pretty at 30 FPS over slightly less pretty at 60 FPS.

Its almost like display technology is advancing faster than consoles can keep up with.

I'd be so happy if movies were in 4k and games were in 1080p60. Lets just get there and leave it for a solid decade until we try to make the leap to 40k or whatever.

This. It basically means nothing without knowing the full spec but sounds good because the number is bigger than the number on the old one.

Well its mainly market speech at this point, but it all boils down to chipset and performance per watt. Its like clock speed and memory bandwidth it really only means anything when comparing chips on the same architecture most times. Amd is way behind nvidia in optimized power consumption too at least up until polaris, so that fury x is using way more power to get similar performance as a 980ti. The added 8gb of ram and "teraflops" do help it perform at higher resolutions like 4k but its not the sole defining factor on performance. Basically amd tried to brute force performance, at least from my understanding which is admittedly not the greatest.

While relevant it doesn't paint the entire picture. GPUs perform a lot of floating point operations so yes the more the better, same goes with memory bandwidth, however it depends on the task. This is why not all games receive the same improvement from newer cards and why AMD cards were very good for bitcoin mining, but just ok for games.

Also of note is APIs. DirectX 12, if memory serves, saw a good improvement on AMD cards even tho they were worse at DirectX 11. Maybe it's because they are collaborating more since the Xbox One uses an AMD APU or the AMD architecture is starting to pay dividends. In any case that is why benchmark sites are a thing.

It's not all of a sudden and comparing NVIDIA vs ATI is pointless because we know Neo and Scorpio are both ATI.

Guys you just weren't seeing those numbers. They decided to put them front and center for easy marketing. This was not just invented.

MARKETING BUZZWOOOOOOOOORDS

Nobody knows what exactly what it means or does but it is high numbers. Same as Megapixels on Cameras. A Marketing Employee's wet dream

Nah people know what it means. Been used plenty in the past. Just in the PC realm.

How about 3D movies. Those are pretty cool you guys.

Buzzwords, Microsoft's marketing department are fishing for buzzwords constantly, like HDR... which i realise is an incoming TV technology to provide more contrast, brightness and colour, but i'm unaware how your gaming platform is related. HDR as it relates to games has been a technology used for the last roughly 11 years, it may function differently to the TV tech but MS won't explain that to you, just keep saying it till people buy your product, HDR! Zing! Money!
4K isn't actually 4K, Phil Spencer says 1K instead of 1080, which was already the marketing term for resolutions around 1920x1080, it all gets dumbed down for the general market.
As always the quality of a game is determined by the people making it, not how many times businessmen say "Tflops".

The term FLOPS (in this case its Tflops or Teraflops) is very ubiquitous and has different applications in actual computer science but in this particular case it pretty much relates to computational performance and what it can do to improve visuals on the next iteration of current-gen console hardware (just like how it is in the GPU of video cards being used in PCs). It's not the be all and end all since there are a different factors that contributes to having improved graphics and visuals but it's been used as a marketing bullet point in the PC space for some time now.

I can be happy if they just put 4K resolution gaming in the back burner and just leave that for the movies for now. Making more games be stable at 60 as the norm would be preferable at this point.

Megapixels are very useful to have (from a post processing standpoint) but a lot of companies market megapixels when talking about phone cameras or $150 compacts, which all have terrible lenses that can't even come close to utilising 12 megapixels for example. I have an S7 Edge with an 8 megapixel camera (which to be fair, is good) but my old 6mp DSLR with my best modern lens slapped on it would blow it out of the water.

So basically like most terms, companies appealing to the average uninformed person fuck it up.

Lol suprised at the responses. While they are marketing and buzz words they are not new. Sony, and MS did the same last gen. PS3 was touted as a supercomputer for passing 2 TFlops. They arent bull shit jargon though. Literally any time you read a tech article on on a GPU, or total system performance, you will come across TFlops. New GTX 1080 puts out about 9 TFlops.

Because the other numbers got too high, so now terraflops are a good number to market to consumers because single digits make sense to them.

@cikame: It's funny thinking that the image being rendered has different exposures and then being merged before its being put out on the screen, like how HDR in photography is being done.

FLOPS have been used for decades in the high-performance computer world. In the last 15 years, FLOPS on graphics cards have become more important with the focus on computation on the GPU. Complicated shaders and running physics on the GPU has lead to raw floating-point performance being a real concern (along with memory bandwidth). In the last gen, comparing the theoretical max FLOPS of a PS3 and a XBOX 360 is much less meaningful because the way that they are programmed to get max performance were substantially different. In the current gen, the architectures are so similar that theoretical performance numbers like the ones Microsoft and Sony are reporting are a pretty good rough measure of peak actual performance.

Blast Processing®
Super FX®
Emotion Engine®
CellProcessor®
DuelCore®
QuadCore®
DoDecaHedralCore (Okay, I made that one up)
16-Bit > 8-Bit
32-Bit > 16-Bit
64-Bit > 32-Bit
128-Bit > 64-Bit
MB > KB (megabyte)
GB > MB (gigabyte)
TB > GB (terabyte)
PB > TB (petabyte)
EB > PB (exobyte)

People will throw out all sorts of numbers and some of these numbers can be a "guide", but at the end of the day it how the game looks and plays in reality on your system using your setup.

Because marketing people love higher numbers, even if regular people have no idea what they mean... in fact, they love them especially when regular people have no idea what they mean.

I still remember the SNES generation, with its 32768 colors versus the blast processor, or how Street Fighter 2 was better in Mega Drive because it had 40 Mb instead of merely 32.

Not that flops are not important... they are; but they are tools (more specifically, they are tools sizes). Having more of them does not make for better games, the same way having more pixels does not make for better games.

Microsoft thinks that's where the money is.

because Terrabytes are a tangible number for a lot of people and flops give it a cool #skate4 edge. like, man i did an awesome terraflop over that ramp.

As others in the thread have pointed out, FLOPS aren't any more or less important; FLOPS have been a way of measuring computing performance for decades. But it just so happens that right now, when some Sony engineer broke down all the NEO changes to some Sony marketing guy, the new number of teraFLOPS is the thing that caught the marketing guy's attention. He probably only half understood most of the meeting, but thought "teraFLOPS" sounded cool.

It really just means "Good for them, the processor is better", but kinda who cares, because of course it was going to be. Get back to me when their new console can be measured in petaFLOPS.

Just because MS suspects they will have nothing to show when Sony has a new product to sell. So they want to FUD Sony's product. They're using specs to do it.

Seems like very normal industry marketing junk to me.

Early adopters love buzzwords.

Because everybody loves the flops! It's impossible NOT to love the flops!

Terraflops have been used in childish system wars since as long as I can remember. PlayStation 2 versus Xbox I distinctly remember and I believe it also happened before that. It most definitely happened every single time after that. This is just the first time it's being marketed by a mainstream console instead of discussed about by fans. That's the only difference.

Well maybe flops were used, but no tera flops

I can't wait for yottaflops so I can say, "I love a whole yottabytes!"

No they were used too. But as computational power goes up of course the measurements will as well. I remember when MEGABYTES were a big deal in computers and it was impressive to see that word used.

@artisanbreads:

I am not saying it is not used anywhere, but the average consumer or even user of this site will not be able to explain what tflops are.

From a hardware standpoint they mean it can handle more. Focusing specifically on terraflops means more resolution and higher framerate at lower cost. Now that they know that a majority of gamers expect this new generation of games to be 1080p at 60hz (why didn't they expect that from the beginning again?) it seems like they're building new hardware to handle that specifically based on developer feedback so far this generation. This, of course, is a very basic explanation.

The fact of the matter is, to you (the consumer) it actually doesn't matter. But at a certain point there is nothing else to sell you on when all they can really say is "it will be a little bit faster (faster frame rate- which is where you'll see the most difference), a little higher resolution than it already is (almost unnoticeable honestly), and look a tiny bit better". To be fair, they will be able to expand on software with this new hardware and the terraflops help with that, but at the end of the day that doesn't (and shouldn't) matter to the consumer. They only tell you about it because it's the most obvious big number to spout at you even though, for you, it's a meaningless thing to talk about. It's just a big number at that point (as others have said).

FLOPS= Floating point operations per second. It's basically how often the hardware can calculate information (again, I'm just giving very basic definitions, I'm not going into detail too much- I don't think it's necessary). To you it's pretty meaningless unless you're building software that runs algorithmic/scientific calculations.

They’ll dance with jingtinglers tied onto their heels.
They’ll blow their floofloovers. They’ll bang their tartoogas.
They’ll blow their whohoopers. They’ll bang their gardookas.
They’ll spin their trumtookas. They’ll slam their slooslunkas.
They’ll beat their blumbloopas. They’ll whack their whowonkas.
And they’ll play noisy games like zoozittacarzay,
Or the roller skate type of la crosse & croquet!
And then they’ll make ear-splitting noises galooks
On that great big electro whocarnio fnooks!

I say we just go back to advertising everything based on bits. It used to be fun pretending that the 64-bit in 1998 actually meant something.

Lol, those were the days! But do you really want to do the math on cards like the GTX 1080 doing 9 TFLOPs in bits....Dear lord....Lets see there is 8 bits in a byte, and one byte is a letter or number...Ill just stop there...Mostly cuz I have too...:-/

Cuz Sony has never done that. They never touted the PS3 as a super computer for its 2 TFLOPS. Boo MS....