A "Teraflop" is the ability to do a trillion floating point calculations in a second. If a system can do 1.8 TFLOPS, it does 1.8 trillion.

It was a sarcastic question. Of course I know what's a teraflop. But I keep seeing the word "teRRaflop" around here, so maybe it was something exclusive, like The Cell or something.

Are you saying that Microsoft decides what is considered "next-gen"?

I think you're just coming up with a definition yourself.  People only started THINKING this, as it is EXPECTED.  However, it isn't what DEFINES it.  Generation is, and always will be, about time/order.

*facepalm*

Where do I even begin with a comment like that? You do know that dx has to be supported by hardware and was chosen over opengl because it was better to work with, not "because of Microsoft". Also I love how you ignore every other aspect, from media formats, cpu power, the algorithms nvidia, AMD, and game companies produce which make the dx/opengl possible etc.

And now we are into the deep tech area where most people become stuck, which you have. The PS4 is very different to a 680GTX. Its obscence bandwith and simple location puts its result close to a 680, hence the 4 terraflop ability, but that can only be achieved with some smart programming wizadry and due to the unique layout consoles are able to produce. Ultimately, the end result will be very close to a 680 GTX through extreme efficiency.

But you neglect if a game relies on a feature set as part of the core gameplay. To remove that would make a game not function, thus not scalable eg what I listed before. Also many devs are starting to realise that to comprimise is not always the best choice and what to capatilise on having new features in vast numbers (which they will need seeing how stagnant the market has become). GPU power comes from the architecture. Just look at the nvidia 4xx to 5xx series. Same size trans, different architecture (and these are not "fancy words", simply the correct and only words that can be used).

Oh right, anything techincal about the WiiU is "bashing"...seriously? Anyway, there is no solid confirmation yet to what new engines the WiiU can run and how well, and looking at current spec etc, it doesn't look good. That is simply an engineers view point on this topic.

You yourself said "close," so why are you trying to argue with me about it? ^_^;

You are talking about physics and maybe AI, I'm talking about graphics fidelity, which most times can be scaled if the feature sets are the same. The most problem I saw with the UE4 engine on PS4 is actually how much the FPS suffered when physics were in motion, hopefully they will optimize it to the PS4 and scale it correctly in the future so the devs won't suffer from it. In the case of rendering the physics calculated and the scene required from the tessellator, raw power matters much more. Those are also not fancy words to start with, not sure where you are getting at.

It only turned into bashing because of your last sentence, and being an engineer doesn't guarantee you are always right, I'd know. The problem is nobody knows how well the Wii U can really do yet in the long run because Nintendo is being a bastard about it, it will look shittier, but how much shittier is what we are trying to find out.

No - many dx11 features can not be scaled. This has been the case with other features such as msaa etc. Either you used the old version, or the new one as the new method was very intensive and could not scale. And regardless, if the features that can be scaled are, you just end up with what we have..

Also we know exactly how powerful the WiiU is. It has been taken apart and analysed extensively. The result; not very powerful at all and on par with current consoles.

Sorry for the late reply, work has been busy as usual, but anyways. The instruction sets in DX11 and DX10 weren't so different other than the addition of what MS deemed as a "standard" for their library with tessellation(and some improved efficiencies here and there.) The problem right now is that we don't know the full details about the Wii U and what people have come up with so far are at least DX10 type with a tessellator, but we don't know what kind of tessellator or if the Wii U is actually DX11 capable or a DX10+tessellator part(which won't matter since Nintendo is the one making their own version of the renderer.) And like all things, tessellation can be scaled, it was actually designed to scale.

I'd say it's more like a 3DS vs PSP situation TBH, on paper, PSP seems to be able to match up and apparently so with some of their end life cycle games, but in reality, games will eventually look better and surpass them in about a year or 2.

Erm, but we know exactly what is in the WiiU so why are you claiming we don't? It has already been stripped and tested and came out rather poor.

o_O; we don't, and we still don't, there are a lot of speculations, like I mentioned earlier, nobody is thinking it will run xbox one or ps4 levels, but we don't have enough data to know how much worse. How the parts interact with each other is unknown, and the GPU is nowhere near diciphered.