I was once moderated by the dark Lord smeags for using the term plebs.  You've been warned!! (reported)  :P 

Just remember that this only matters if the tasks the programmer wants to do are suited for it.

Otherwise this "magic" doesnt happend, and its only if the progammer knows to use it, and does so.

I know that! Whoooohoooo!

... that's what I just told BraLod

We have been over this already. This isn't a game changer, this isn't some "Secret Sauce" that doubles the capabilities of the Playstation 4.

"at full floats, we have 4.2 teraflops. With half-floats, it's now double that, which is to say, 8.4 teraflops in 16-bit computation. This has the potential to radically increase performance"

The hell does that mean, why run at "full floats" at all if half floats increase performance then.

Half precision floats only help in limited cases ...

Half precision isn't good enough for making a robust coordinate system in games so the quality of vertex shaders and compute shader based physics lowers and the quality of pixel shaders get lowered too in the process ...

I think someone already said on this site this won't do anything to help didn't they?

What specifically about the PS4's GPU allows it to take advantage of the half data type? Hasn't this existed since 2002? I'd think the calculation gains would be realizable by all modern computing devices. I figured they used floats because floats are standard and likely the loss of accuracy at 16 bits would be unwanted (not sure why though, gaming isn't say -scientific computing.)

Nope! http://giphy.com/search/forgive-me