BlkPaladin on 08 November 2016
| fleischr said: Eh... it's based on this belief in FP16 operations rather than FP32 for determining flops. Quite honestly, very few people can actually explain it clearly or correctly. I doubt there's even real-world example of FP16 implementations out there just yet. For most people - it's really a bunch of magical thinking they rely upon to tell themselves PS4 is more powerful than Scorpio or that Switch is for sure as powerful as PS4. |
In the video he said that processing things in FP16 isn't new. It is just being pushed on the GPU side. When I was talking about the Switch's 1.5 number I was drawing on the information from when CPUs did this. It just somethings don't need to use the full 32bit register so it only makes sense to spilt the register into two FP16 registers, so the things that would have usually left most the register empty or all zero's can now use that empty area for other calculations, so it speeds up certain processes.
And how much of a benefit developers and the games they make get out of this depends on the tools they are given from Nintendo/nVidia and Sony/AMD to utilize this.
