If you happen to frequent places like Twitter, Reddit and N4G, hell if you even go 10 foot within the vicinity of a social media outlet, chances are you have been hearing one word repeatedly lately – Teraflop (6 of them to be exact).
Depending on your social media preference and the people who you follow, subscribe to or regularly check content from, you may have a rather convoluted understanding of what a teraflop is and what the announcement that Project Scorpio’s 6 teraflops means to you as a gamer and a potential purchaser.
Today I’d like to take the time to explain to you a bit about what this concept means and how it can potentially affect your gaming experience in the future if you find yourself making a purchase based on a number.
So to begin with, let’s take a look at what a teraflop actually is. In technical terms a teraflop is a unit of computing that represents a trillion floating-point operations per second. Now you can see where the ‘flops’ comes into it. The ‘flops’ are a measure of computer performance, which is useful in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations. Lost already? Don’t worry, that’s not information that we really need to bother about, how that effects gaming is explained in easy to understand terms below.
In order to create large and expanding virtual environments for us to game in, developers need to know how many of these teraflops they will have access to as that tells them how much computing power they have at their disposal. As the number of teraflops goes up, so does the number of floating-point operations per second that can be performed.
Just because you can create more floating-point operations though, which enables you to make the large and expanding virtual environments that we talked about above, does not mean that the platform itself necessarily has faster performance. Teraflops do not dictate a platforms performance, they do not make a console into a ‘beast’ simply by there being more of them, however what they do, which is important, is give developers more room to play, expand and create amazing experiences for us gamers.
Is it better to have more teraflops? Yes, and no. Depending on the accompanying core speed, frame buffer size and speed, the GPU architecture, RAM, core speed, and actually many other factors, the number of teraflops can actually result in slower or lesser performance. However, when the combination is right, more teraflops means more options, better experiences and allows for greater gaming immersion and interactivity, plus it gives developers more freedom in creativity.
What we do know for certain though is that Microsoft are putting a very strong focus on ensuring that their next console sets a benchmark in gaming, that they provide us with the option to buy a console that has 4K performance, won’t divide the current Xbox One community, and enables us to delve into VR experiences. We know that they always provide us with solid infrastructure, so the unknown element of exactly what other components will be present to compliment these 6 teraflops and see them reach their potential should really be of no major concern to console gamers.
Do you have anything to worry about when it comes to teraflops? No. It’s a technical term that has so many different variables attached to it that will decide if the number of them actually improves your gaming experience or not, that the only thing you can do for the time being is sit back and wait for more news to be revealed about the console’s accompanying architecture, and hopefully rest easy with the above statement.
