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When the first specs for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One leaked, an apparent disparity in their graphical performance was highlighted with one stark comparison. The Microsoft console - initially at least, before its specs tweak - featured 1.23 teraflops of GPU power, while the Sony machine trumped it with significantly higher 1.84TF. On paper, the comparison looked vast. Before a single console had been sold, Microsoft looked to be in trouble. The raw figures suggested that PS4 had an additional 50 per cent of graphical power - a hugely important metric for gamers eager to see the next generation of consoles deliver the most powerful hardware possible.Now it seems the position of specs superiority has changed hands with the reveal of their successors. PlayStation 4K Neo currently has a mooted 4.2TF while Microsoft's Project Scorpio trumps it with around 6TF - a 43 per cent advantage. All of which is fascinating of course, but the question is, what is a teraflop and to what extent are these seemingly vast spec differentials actually indicative of performance and indeed the gameplay experience?
At a basic level, a 'flop' is a floating point operation - a basic unit of computational power. When applied to the AMD graphics technology at the heart of the Microsoft and Sony consoles, the calculation is really simple. You multiply the amount of shader cores in the GPU by its clock-speed. With AMD hardware, you'll find 64 shaders per compute unit. Xbox One has 12 CUs, PS4 has 18, giving us a total of 768 and 1152 shaders. The clock-speeds of the two consoles are 853MHz and 800MHz respectively.
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