In a word, yes, Stadia has more horsepower than the upcoming PS5 will. However, it’s more nuanced than that. There are a lot of ways to measure the power of a video game system, but using teraFLOPS is the easiest metric to use.
What is a teraFLOP?
A FLOP stands for “Floating point operations per second”, or how many calculations can be done each second. A megaFLOP is a million per second, a gigaFLOP is a billion per second, and a teraFLOP is a trillion per second. When we’re comparing these systems, we’re looking at how many trillions of operations can be done every second. It’s mind-boggling!
How do the various systems compare?
- Xbox Series X – 12 teraFLOPS
- Google Stadia – 10.7
- PS5 – 10.28
- Xbox One X – 6
- PS4 Pro – 4.2
- Nintendo Switch – 0.5
As you can see Google Stadia is way beyond the current gen systems, and even ahead of the upcoming PS5. Plus, Google is beginning to upgrade their hardware so it’ll get even better.
It’s more than just teraFLOPS
That said, teraFLOPS don’t tell the whole story. Other computing metrics such as GPU performance, memory and things like that will make a difference too.
In the case of Stadia, the main issue to be concerned about is streaming compression. With other systems, you get the raw output from their machines. With Stadia, Google’s servers do the work but then they need to compress and send the image over to you. They do an unbelievably good job with that, but it’s still a compressed image and not the same as the pure output from the machine.
We’ll see how Google does in bringing in new games in the coming years, but no developer will ever be able to say that Stadia isn’t powerful enough.