Console floating-point performance

[EagerStallion]

FLOPS, or floating point operations per second, is the best way to measure performance across different architectures.

Which is faster, the PS2, XBOX, or Wii?

PS2 was released first

XBOX is likely the fastest

Will is a newer but less powerful console

My bet is on the XBOX because it used a 700mhz Pentium CPU, but the MIPS arch of the 250MHz PS2's EE seems to be really good for floating point. How does a 700mhz Wii stack up?

[Der Siebte Schatten]

[color=#000080]Hem... Google please?

*After a 15-seconds search...*

• Xbox: 20 gigaFLOPS
• Wii: 12 gigaflops
• Gamecube: 9.4 gigaflops
• Playstation 2: 6.2 gigaflops
  

Interesting to see that Xbox was already much more powerful than Wii, and PS2 was last... but FLOPS doesn't make all the cake. For instance, GCN was more powerful than PS2, but limited by the disc size for example. Also, it only counts the GPU part of the console, and even for the GPU, it can do more FLOPS but be also slower than another one...[/color]

[AnyOldName3]

FLOPS is a good measure of best-case performance for floating point operations but isn't a good metric for anything else. If you're trying to compare supercomputers, it can be pretty good, as supercomputers tend to do exclusively floating point operations. General computing, including games, includes (and is often mostly) integer and branching operations, so FLOPS are barely relevant. Sometimes FLOPS are reasonable for comparison of graphics architectures in the absence of any actual games, but that's not even useful here - the GameCube and Wii both used a huge number of integers on the GPU, despite other systems of the era being predominantly float-based.

[EagerStallion]

The xbox probably takes the cake because of its x86 architecture. Although like I said, MIPS has better IPC (?).

[Helios]

"better IPC" is a very hard statement to play with, because it isn't really a useful metric of how fast a CPU is. One CPU could be very efficient at some instructions but less at others.

It's better to just not comment on IPC at all unless you're a CPU hardware engineer.