Both the Xbox Series X and PS5 promise to be a major generational shift, and one of the most talked about performance indicators for each console is the TFLOPS, or "teraflops." While this number is a processor performance metric, it is somewhat confusing what this number means and how the increase in this number will be reflected in gaming performance.

The teraflops discussion has recently come up again as Xbox chief Phil Spencer revealed that the Xbox Series X specs will include "12 TFLOPS of GPU performance." So here's what you need to know about teraflops and how they will affect your PS5 and Xbox Series X experience.

Without getting into the complex math behind the name, FLOPS refers to floating point operations per second, a measure of a processor's ability to perform operations in a dynamic range of numbers. A teraFLOP means one trillion floating point operations per second. [Naturally, the larger this number, the more computing power the processor has.

Yes, that's why Microsoft is so quick to speak of this number. The company was also quick to mention the Xbox One X's still impressive 6 teraflops. If that number doubles to 12 teraflops, the Series X will be ahead of any other consumer graphics processor on the market, even for PCs. If the Series X is released during the 2020 holiday season, it will likely be the most powerful gaming setup available in the expected price range of around $500 to $600.

This is where things get a little murky, as the exact nature of performance, aside from the number of raw processes a graphics processor can perform, also depends heavily on all the other components in the machine, such as memory, read/write speed, and other factors. Any console or gaming PC can only perform as well as its weakest component. [i.e., you can't directly compare the 12 teraflops of an AMD RDNA processor like the one in the Xbox Series X to the FLOPs of an Nvidia GPU. However, the Series X's main competitor, the PlayStation 5, will use a very similar processor that will have fewer teraflops.

Microsoft seems determined to stay ahead in the hardware arms race. Depending on a number of other factors, such as hardware penetration and the willingness of developers to utilize all of the power of the Xbox Series X, there could be a noticeable performance gap between the Series X and the PS5, partly due to the high teraflops count.

The teraflop number is also supported by a very impressive feature set. Thanks to hardware upgrades like solid state hard drives that reduce load times and software features like DirectX Ray Tracing support, the Xbox Series X is significantly more powerful than the Xbox One.

Sony has yet to reveal how many teraflops of GPU power the PS5 will offer, and rumors about its specs vary; a recent rumor discussed on ResetEra puts the PS5 at about 9 teraflops, giving the Xbox Series X the edge This would be the case. However, an older rumor from a Pastebin post found in 2019 (via Notebookcheck) stated that the PS5 has a whopping 14 teraflops of performance, which is more than Microsoft's machine. how will the PS5 be positioned against the Xbox Series X? should be more accurate as we get closer to the holiday 2020 season launch of both machines.