The new Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 are here, they of course tout the hottest graphics and the fastest processors, but how fast is it exactly compared to previous gens? Comparison chart below.
What are FLOPS?
FLOPS is an acronym for floating point operations per second. It is used as a general measure of performance of a processing unit.
What’s a floating point operation?
Floating point operations are required when dealing with software that uses a huge range of numbers. Software stores exponentially large or small numbers into a predictable encoded 64 bit size.
Converting these 64-bit instructions into raw numbers takes processing power. Processors can be measured in FLOPS, which refers to how fast they can turn bit instructions into numbers.
In gaming, floating point numbers are used to determine polygons and shapes. The more FLOPS a GPU can process, the faster it will be able to render a 3D scene. FLOPS
FLOPS is only one aspect of determining console power, it won’t tell you what is the best gaming console, but it helps give you an idea of what the comparative raw processing speed of a system.
Gaming Console GPU GFLOPS Comparison Table
| System | GFlops | GPU Name |
| Xbox Series X | 12000 | Scarlett |
| Playstation 5 | 9200 | Unknown |
| Xbox One X | 6000 | Scorpio |
| Playstation 4 Pro | 4200 | Neo |
| Xbox Series S | 4000 | Lockhart |
| PlayStation 4 | 1843 | Liverpool |
| Valve Steam Deck | 1600 | RDNA 2 |
| Xbox One S | 1400 | Durango 2 |
| Xbox One | 1310 | Durango |
| Nintendo Switch (OG & OLED) (Docked) | 500 | GM20B |
| Nintendo Switch (OG, Lite & OLED) | 393.2 | GM20B |
| Xbox 360 | 240 | Xenos |
| PlayStation 3 | 230.4 | Reality Synthesizer |
| Nintendo Wii U | 176 | Hollywood |
| Xbox | 20 | NV2A” ASIC. |
| Nintendo Wii | 12 | Hollywood |
| Nintendo Gamecube | 9.4 | Flipper |
| PlayStation 2 | 6.2 | Graphics Synthesizer |
| Nintendo 3DS | 4.8 | PICA200 |
| Dreamcast | 1.4 | PowerVR CLX2 |
| Nintendo DS | 0.6 | |
| Nintendo 64 | 0.1 | Reality Coprocessor |
FLOPS Conversions
You might see FLOPS, GFLOPS and TFLOPS terms floating around, these are all the same measurement, just different magnitudes. A simple reference would be to compare bytes to megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes.
1000 FLOPS = 1 MFLOPS
1000 MFLOPS = 1 GFLOPS
1000 GFLOPS = 1 TFLOPS
What do the FLOPS mean for next-gen?
While the numbers are nice to have as a rough comparison of compute power, the real world difference will be less obvious, the Xbox Series X will likely have slightly better resolution or framerates in cross-platform games, but FLOPS should not be the deciding factor in which console you choose.
Exclusives, other features like SSD speeds, backward compatibility, crossplay and mouse and keyboard should be bigger factors in your decision.
Comparing console generations gives you an approximate calculation for how much power the new consoles have.
13 Responses
Your chart is not too scale, the ps5 in your graphics is set at 9.4tf instead of 10.28
You’re totally right, fixed! Thanks for that.
series s?
Thank you!
Nintendo switch is 1Tflop, you have it here at 0.3 tflop
It’s a theoretical processing speed
It’s 1Tflops in speed if you calculate it as 16bit operations only, but that’s a 64bit processor
Yes that’s correct, that’s the real speed of the switch
You can’t expect much at a 2015 processor
its 0.3tflops in handheld mode and 0.7 in docked mode. you can only reach the 1tflop figure with an overclock
NVIDIA confirmed that PS3 GPU is at 192GFlops, not 230.4.
Graph is garbage… intentionally minimizes the ps5s bar compared to the xbox x. It sits directly in the middle of the xbox one x and series x… but the gap from one x is more than 4 tf, but less than 2 tf to the series x. Yet visually the gap is the same… smh
Switch is 1tflop, sir. Not .3
You forgot Stadia has 10.7 TFLOPS, which is more than the PS5.
The Wii U has a more powerful GPU than the xbox 360 or ps3 – its built on a R700 GPU with around the level of a 5570 performance – which is about 400 GFLOPS
This Philips CD-i runs at 1x FlowersOfRobertMaplethorpes. Nothing beats that!