Clarifying the 1.5TFLOPS of the SWITCH for those who just see the numbers.

[vivster]

BlkPaladin said:

vivster said:

 

This often quoted number relates to the Parker performance for FP16. In layman's terms FP16 stands for "half precision" which means that the GPU will process certain information less reliable. In games, as in contrast to graphic programs, precision is not important in all tasks. That means it's possible to use only half the precision and will still gain a good enough result.

 

Just a correction you are not entirely correct about this. Percision is not how accuratly the chip does the calculation but how big the instruction is, that is when you are dealing with programming. FP16, floating point 16, are floating point instructions that are only 16-bits big maximum. And FP32 are 32 bit max instructions. For some procedures you only need FP16 and if you optimize correctly you can run two instruction concurently depending on the chip, from how nVidia is advertising this chip it seems to be the case. So in some cases and if you don't need 32-bit instructions you can process instructions faster this way.

This is one of the reasons why you don't want to look at just FLOPS, or anything else as is. I seen a person saying that the Xbox One runs at twice the speed if you do it in FP16 which may not be the case since the chip might not be able to do two FP16 instructions at the same time, though it may allow them.

Well, the length of a floating point number IS its precision. Like 3.14159265359 is more precise than 3.14. It's used like that in physics where precision is important and as such you will use the most precise number possible. You can use smaller numbers but the end product while correct will not be as precise.

Precision is just a fancy word for longer numbers.