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Playstation 4 original vs "Pro" - How important are the TFLOPs?

T

TheDarkKnight

Senior member
I've been researching graphics specifications lately trying to figure out the most important things to look for and I noticed that the number of TFLOPs doubled on the Playstation 4 Pro.

I've had people say that the TFLOPs aren't all that important in games these days. Or maybe I'm mis-stating the comments. Maybe a better way of saying what they meant was that your getting more TFLOPs power than you actually need as a side-effect of the more important performance spec of maximum theoretical memory bandwidth.

Can someone help me understand this a little bit better. In the case of the Playstation 4 original vs pro, the TFLOPs doubled but maybe games won't require doubling of TFLOPs as much as memory bandwidth? So, it's just a coincidental increase as a result of .... what exactly???
 
Tflops is a measure of gpu power, allows games to run with better image quality.

Ps4 pro compared to ps4 has a faster cpu, faster memory and a much bigger gpu, well worth the ~33% higher price imo.
 
It helps to understand what exactly a "TFLOP" is. TFLOP is short for Tera (or Trillion) FLoating point OPerations. It is a relatively important number as it relates to raw performance capability of a GPU since decimal math operations are pretty much a staple of graphics. However, I would say that looking at FLOPs are equivalent to looking at a car and only considering its horsepower rating. Sure, that can give you an idea of its capability, but only to an extent as there are other aspects that affect it too. I would focus more on FLOPs when I know that a lot of the other variables are the same. For example, two different 1080 Ti cards may perform differently due to cooling, and knowing the TFLOP difference between them would be decent (so is just knowing the clockspeed difference).
 
When the PS4 Slim is $300 it's kind of stupid to pick it over the PS4 Pro at $400. It's the same cpu but with an overclock (somewhere around 25-30% if I recall right) but with a gpu about 2.4x stronger. Now when PS4 Slims get dropped to $200 they're a lot more compelling.
 
My fiancée has a PS4 Slim one one TV and I have a Pro hooked up to a 4k TV and it's very noticeable the higher resolution difference in the same games.
 
Not to mention some games have received updates to use the higher performance for better framerate, higher resolution, or both. Options not available on the standard PS4. Also on the Pro you can enable something called "boost mode" which attempts to brute force games without specific pro enhancements coded in. This sometimes can result in a game not having fps drops as frequently, or sometimes locking the fps to the cap now. For example Just Cause 3 had some incredibly poor performance when it launched and they patched it multiple times and it still ran very badly. With the PS4 Pro enabling boost mode allowed the game to hit the 30fps cap much more reliably. It is at times nearly a slideshow on the standard PS4. The Witcher 3 gets smoother gameplay in specific areas such as the swamp which had a lot of particle effects and such that really tanked the frame rate. The downside is that some games can exhibit bugs in boost mode because the code is being rendered on the CPU with different timing. Errors could occur, but they are pretty rare.

So to really get a handle on the PS4 Pro's performance you need to look at the entire package, beyond just teraflop performance and raw numbers. If all you care about is teraflops on a console the Xbox One X is for you.
 
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i was just recently in the market for a ps4 and every single review said the ps4 pro was the way to go and they made sense to me. for $100 extra you get great bang for buck.
 
Flapdrol1337 said:
Tflops is a measure of gpu power, allows games to run with better image quality.

Ps4 pro compared to ps4 has a faster cpu, faster memory and a much bigger gpu, well worth the ~33% higher price imo.
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TeraFlops stands for floating point operations a second and does not directly imply better image quality. These two are not directly connected but having more TeraFlops will help but it doesn’t mean better. In this case, yes the ps4 pro will be better but TeraFlops aren’t always as big of a deal as core and memory clocks
 
purbeast0 said:
I don't have a 4K (or HDR) TV and have a Pro, I'm sure some games still run better than the OG PS4. Also, if PSVR is at all of interest for you, then you'd want a Pro for sure.
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Honestly, if you aren’t using it for Vr and your hitting max frame rate then, I don’t think it’s worth it.
 
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