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Ok what is a teraflop?

King of Custard

King of Custard

Member
Oct 26, 2017
243
Desert Land
teraflop
/ˈtɛrəflɒp/

noun
COMPUTING a unit of computing speed equal to one million million (1012) floating-point operations per second.

At the risk of losing my gamer cred, I can't quite figure this out. It seems to mostly relate to the processor, but then why not use the processor speed. I would understand that and that's worked every other generation.

I know what a motherboard is and how that effects thing's.

I know what ram is and I can understand a graphics card.

Basically I want to know what 1 teraflop is then I can quantity it?
 
cakely

cakely

Member
Oct 27, 2017
13,149
Chicago
King of Custard said:
teraflop
/ˈtɛrəflɒp/

noun
COMPUTING a unit of computing speed equal to one million million (1012) floating-point operations per second.

At the risk of losing my gamer cred, I can't quite figure this out. It seems to mostly relate to the processor, but then why not use the processor speed. I would understand that and that's worked every other generation.

I know what a motherboard is and how that effects thing's.

I know what ram is and I can understand a graphics card.

Basically I want to know what 1 teraflop is then I can quantity it?
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You ... pasted the definition right there.

A 12TF GPU can perform 12 trillion floating-point operations per second.

The GPU uses those operations to render graphics into a buffer. With more operations you can increase the number of pixels you render, the amount of times you can render an entire scene per second, the number of triangles you can draw, the number of shader effects you can put on textures, etc. Basically, factors that increase the image quality of a given game.
 
low-G

low-G

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,144
Remember bits?
Remember polygons per second?

I especially miss polygons per second, that was fun.
 
TripaSeca

TripaSeca

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,762
São Paulo
The real question here is "why a teraflop is something for AMD and something else for NVidia?" And "why PS5 TF is different than XBSX TF?"
 
Windows-PC

Windows-PC

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
434
I don't know, but I know that if you put 12.1 TF's together than it is an XBox Series X.

Sorry, couldn't resist :D TF is an overall metric to show the power of a Console or PC.
 

Deleted member 3082

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,099
teraflop
/ˈtɛrəflɒp/

noun
PORTMANTEAU of terrible and flop. Ex: "Hey, did you play <popular game>? It was a real teraflop!"
 

Monsterqken

Member
Dec 26, 2019
415
It's how fast data can travel around the earth. 16 teraflops means 16 flops around the earth per second.
 
joeblow

joeblow

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,928
Laker Nation
I remember the days when Atari bragged about its 64-bit console (Jaguar) as compared to the 32-bit consoles the other companies were offering. In the end, there was a lot more to it than that for making technically top tier games (PS1 was better, the Saturn... perhaps not so much).

Maybe the overall TFlop situation with next-gen machines is similar to that.
 
Goron2000

Goron2000

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
542
A Terraflop is something Sony were very quick to flaunt last gen when they had more of them but next generation they are meaningless.
 
No_Style

No_Style

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,795
Ottawa, Canada
A meaningless metric to measure GPU performance without context.

Similar to cars, there is a lot more that goes into measuring a car's performance than raw horsepower.
 
SubvertedTrope

SubvertedTrope

Member
Sep 14, 2018
4,615
Someone explained it to me but I somehow immediately forgot. It's jibber jabber pretty much, It does some unspecified thing.
 
FernandoRocker

FernandoRocker

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
7,987
México
For the saying that TF do not matter. In this context (PS5 vs XSX) is not meaningless, because both are using the same architecture.

It matters in this context, and the XSX has the advantage.
 
Windows-PC

Windows-PC

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
434
User banned (1 week): Trolling. Platform Wars. History of similar behavior.
saci said:
Something that only really matters when the console I own has more of them than the competition
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This! Thanks for posting this, some posts in here are already from sad PlayStation Fans who needs to go to bed as soon as possible, and start a new fresh day tomorrow in peace.
 
Betelgeuse

Betelgeuse

Member
Nov 2, 2017
2,941
It's a measurement of peak theoretical performance with respect to a specific type of operation - one that is fundamental to graphical rendering.

It's an OK way of making a fairly superficial comparison between GPUs of the same architecture.

It's far less meaningful when comparing GPUs of differing architecture. An 7.5 TF RDNA2 GPU will beat a 12 TF GCN GPU. A lower TF Nvidia GPU will beat a higher TF AMD GPU.
 
Fat4all

Fat4all

Woke up, got a money tag, swears a lot
Member
Oct 25, 2017
92,361
here
King of Custard said:
This is about as helpful as the dictionary meaning, explain what is one teraflop?
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picture in your head

a box
you open the box and inside is

a box
you open that box and inside is

another box
this box is purple
you peek inside and discover

a box
you open the box and inside is

a mouse
it's wearing a tiny clown outfit

the mouse jumps out and kicks you in the nards
 
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