How Many Teraflops is PS4?

Whenever we as gamers buy a certain gaming hardware, we like to gauge its performance and understand where it stands in the overall performance hierarchy.

With PCs, things are simple, we just look at certain benchmarks like Passmark, Geekbench, etc. With gaming consoles like PS4, traditional benchmarks do not work and when we wish to understand its graphical performance, we look at the metric called Teraflops.

The higher the teraflops of a gaming console, the better would be its performance. This begs the question, “How many Teraflops is PS4?” and more importantly, how does it compare with the rest of the gaming hardware out there?

In short, PS4 Original and PS4 Slim offer 1.84 Teraflops of GPU power. The PS4 Pro version offers a whopping 4.2 Teraflops of power.

In the following text, I will explain Teraflops and their impact in general and have a look at the Teraflops in PS4 in particular.

Understanding Teraflops and Its Impact on Gaming

Before I take a look at the Teraflops in PS4 variants and how they compare with the rest of the consoles and GPUs out there, it is first important to understand WHAT Teraflops actually mean.

Teraflops are essentially a metric of performance measurement of GPUs. Just like how the clock speed and the number of cores are a metric of performance for CPUs, Teraflops are used in relation to GPUs alone.

The term Teraflops stands for “Trillion Floating-Point Operations Per Second.” This is abbreviated to just Teraflops.

The higher the Terflops of a GPU, the higher the graphics quality settings, resolution, and frame rate it will be able to support.

Teraflops measurement is divided into three varying levels of precision:

• Half (FP16) – Fastest
• Single (FP32)
• Double (FP64) – Slowest

For gaming and gaming hardware, we look at the Single (FP32) metric only.

So How Many Teraflops is PS4?

The Teraflops of PS4 differ from variant to variant.

There are three PS4 variants namely, the Original PS4, PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro.

The Original and PS5 Slim are rated at 1.84 Teraflops. The PS4 Pro, however, is rated at 4.2 Teraflops.

How Does PS4 Teraflops Compare With the Rest?

The following table shows highlights the Teraflops of PS4 variants, Xbox, and PS5 as well as of some of the other popular PC graphics cards out there:

As you can see, compared to the current generation of gaming hardware, the original and Slim variants have among the weakest gaming hardware and they can be compared to a low-end gaming computer.

The performance of PS4/PS4 Slim is comparable to the 2 GB variant of NVIDIA GTX 1050 only.

The PS4 Pro, on the other hand, is much more beefier. This gaming console has even more Teraflops as compared to the 9th generation Xbox Series S gaming console.

PS4 Pro is comparable to a lower-midrange GTX 1650 Super graphics card in comparison.

Therefore, while all variants of the PS4 are quite compared to modern gaming hardware, the PS4 Pro still stands out with fairly decent hardware.

What Do Higher Teraflops Mean for PS4 Pro?

The higher teraflops and in turn, the higher graphics computational power in the PS4 Pro have a lot of implications.

For starters, due to the limited hardware capabilities, the original PS4 and the Slim version are ONLY limited to 1080P @ 30 FPS gameplay.

PS4 Pro, on the other hand, thanks to its more advanced hardware, is capable of delivering up to 4K @ 60 FPS gaming experience.

But, since 4K @ 60 FPS is quite taxing even for 4K Pro, the vast majority of games even on this console are either rated at 4K @ 30 FPS or 1080P @ 60 FPS.

Also Read: Does PS4 Support 60FPS?

Teraflops NOT Always an Accurate Measure

It is worth noting that while Teraflops can give you a good sneak peek into the overall performance of your gaming hardware, it does NOT always reflect the actual or real-world performance of a GPU.

There are many other factors come into play particularly the architecture of the graphics chip and the memory.

Take, for instance, the AMD Radeon VII and the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti. Despite the former having 13.4 TFLOPS and the latter also having 13.4 TFLOPS, the latter is 50% as powerful.

All this goes to show that Teraflops is not always the best measure of GPU performance.

For PC GPUs, we use more reliable benchmarks such as userbenchmarks.com, G3DMark, or Geekbench. However, since these benchmarks cannot be used on gaming consoles, it is hard to define where they truly stand in the performance hierarchy.

Console Games Are Also More Optimized

Another point that goes against using Teraflops as the sole measurement of GPU performance is the fact that console games are far more optimized as compared to the same on PCs.

Since developers can tweak each and every scene of the game to a tailor-made console hardware environment, you can expect a much more optimized gameplay on consoles as compared to that on PCs.

Games on PCs are not developed with a single hardware set in mind but with a combination of hundreds of CPUs and GPUs in mind.

In other words, a lower teraflops GPU on a gaming console can give you a much better gaming performance as compared to a higher teraflops GPU on PCs.

Also Read: Does PS4 Support 144Hz?

Final Words

So the short answer to the question “How many Teraflops is PS4?” is as follows:

• Original PS4: 1.84 Teraflops
• PS4 Slim: 1.84 Teraflops
• PS4 Pro: 4.2 Teraflops

PS4 Pro is the only variant that truly stands out given the current gaming hardware trends.