TFLOPS!
With every new gaming generation approaching or a mid-generation PRO devices leaked, we keep hearing the term “Tera Flops” or “TFlops” for days, in all articles & YouTube videos. But sometimes, my gamer friends (and some industry friends too) have some misunderstanding about what TFlops unit truly is. Some people think it is a measurement unit like a Byte or Meter, that can measure an exact thing that is probably physical, but in fact it is (imo) more of an abstract measurement unit, just like a car’s odometer!
“Many 8th generation games looks & performs better than 9th generation games, despite the TFlops gap!”
A quote from me thinking in the toilet!
When you read in a car’s odometer that it has the maximum of 260Km/H this doesn’t mean there is a component in that car that delivers this “speed” or “power”, in fact, it is a sum of multiple measurement units of multiple components & factors inside that car. It is something like the weigh of the car & the horse power of the engine & the shape of that car against air fraction, the tires and their size and their fricion,…etc. . Does this mean you will always reach the 260Km/H, even if you wanted to?! Yes you can, if all conditions are met, but most likely, you buy a car, use it for 10 or 20 years & never reach that promised power! And it is exactly the same for GPU, the TFlops is the sum of all the components of that given GPU (car) with their different measurement units (Hz, Units, Instructions,…etc.), and the premise of the power that this GPU can deliver. But, does this mean you should/must get that promised amount of power?? Of course no, it depends on the conditions your GPU(car) is running against! But in beautiful world, with all conditions are met, with well optimized game/app that utilizes the GPU and enough power from the power supply, you can reach that amount of TFlops!
So couple of years ago, i decided to put this info in a tiny tweet just in case it can be useful to somebody. The tweet thread had couple more notes i believe.
And yesterday i went through a tiny discussion about the TFlop, and gave my common car odometer example, and after going back to my PC, i decided to record almost the same discussion and put it in a video, here below you can watch it.
-m
#Update
As this entirely was something i found out by some digging, it may be not 100% accurate despite the correct result, numbers are correct, but factors/names maybe for other things, so here are some clarifications from couple of twitter gentlemen:
-m
