Why did the console bit wars end? During the 32 bit era, PS1 and Saturn were 32 bit systems, and Nintendo was boasting about having a 64 bit system. The last time console makers boasted about bits in their system was the sixth generation, with the Dreamcast, GameCube, and PS2 being 128 bits.

Question

Why didn’t the bit war continue into the seventh generation? Why didn’t the amount of bits double to 256 bits like they did in past generations? Any insight into this would be appreciated.

In: 609

Answer 1

Primarily older game consoles had a single CPU for both graphics and game engine. So how many processing “bits” the single CPU had, was an easy way to measure it’s performance.

With modern machines, they have multiple chips that handle audio, graphics, game engine (CPU) – as well as memory amount and memory bandwidth – and all modern machines are 64 bit. So console manufactures had to find a new way to differentiate performance and started using TFLOPS (Teraflops) because it was a summary of many calculations the machine could do across all the different components.

Neither “bits” nor “tflops” is (or was) an *accurate* way to measure performance, but it was a *simple* way to make comparisons, and so that’s what the industry used.

**Source: Was one of the causes for the change in how performance was measured.**