A giga flop -- well, you know kilo = 1000 (except in the case of memory, which k = 1024), mega = million, giga = billioin, tera = trillion.

a flop is a floating-point operation per second; floating points are basically numbers with movable decimal points (floating) with arbitrary accuracy needed to do 3 d calculations (since 3-d is basically rendered as x/z, y/z where z is the distance from the 3d point to the screen), so to maximise 3d graphics you have to increase the speed at which you can do floating point division; one of the slowest operations a cpu performs (and hence a bottleneck).

In plain English that means the ps3 appears to be able to crunch numbers for 3d nearly twice as fast as the xBox. Except that you can let the GPU handle it instead of the CPU... and you'll notice both GPU's handle flops in the Terra Flops (trillions of operations per second). Mind you, the specs still say Xbox360 overall can handle 1 TerraFlop, and the PS3 can handle 2 TF.

Except that doesn't really matter that much.


Despite the fact that Jin is a French Canadian (and I can barely speak French) I'm sure he can find a way to put this in plainer English. But like he and BB have said, that particular spec doesn't matter much.

Remember the war on bits? 16 bit vs 32, etc? Did you realize the N64 was 64bit, the DC and the PS2 both 128 bit; but the GC was ALSO only 64 bit; and the XBox is only 32 bit.... bit which one's the most powerful of the lot?


The numbers don't always tell the story.

Incidentally, in theory the ps2 could push more polygons than the DC. However, it doesn't have enough RAM to actually do so. Sony beefed up the Polygons per sec spec, knowing it would look impressive, but only include enough ram to actually reach half that number. The DC's theoretical limit on PPS was about half that of the ps2... but ironically they're actually the same since the DC can actually reach it's PPS limit.


Like BB already said; specs don't matter until you see the games in motion. Correction, until you PLAY the games.

Evil~Toast