Why The PS5’s 10.3 TFLOPs Figure Is Misleading (wccftech)

[Nat]

Here is where things get murkier though, while Microsoft's reveal was excruciatingly clear, succinct and allowed third-party testers like Digital Foundry to get closeups out, I found the Sony Playstation 5 reveal to be somewhat lacking in clarity and almost, deliberately vague. My primary pain point was when the Sony PS5 was advertised to ship with 10.3 TFLOPs and then the words "variable clock rate" were uttered in the same breath. This, as many of you have guessed is misleading (the magnitude of which depends on a couple of things discussed below).

On the other hand, the Sony PS5 has something called a variable clock rate. What that means is that the console will not run the GPU at 2.23 GHz all the time. Since Microsoft's clock is a static number, just because PS5's clock rate is variable makes the 10.28 TFLOPs number uncomparable to the Xbox Series X and misleading. This is because XSX is displaying the "sustained TFLOPs" figure while PS5 is displaying the "peak TFLOPs" figure.

The fact that the XSX has 44% higher CU count is something that the PS5 simply cannot overcome. Microsoft might actually have underclocked its own console to make way for a "fine wine" philosophy as we have seen in the past. In fact, if they were to approach a dynamic clocking philosophy as well, they can hit an astounding 14.6 TFLOPs figure (using the PS5 clocks) - which is absolutely insane for a console. That said, you don't want to do that. Optimizing games is hard and having a static clock with no power fluctuation shenanigans is always easier to work with than a dynamic approach.

Sony PS5 Vs. Xbox Series X Technical Analysis: Why The PS5's 10.3 TFLOPs Figure Is Misleading

We now have preliminary specifications of both the Microsoft Xbox Series X (XSX) and Sony Playstation 5 and it's time to do a quick analysis of their graphics capabilities. Before […]

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