Use of Double Precision in Graphic cards

[amsga]

Hi,

I went through wikipedia today and found out about this Double Precision floating point in graphic cards and I was wondering if this is important in today's games or what are its applications?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Northern_Islands_.28HD_6xxx.29_series

The 68XX and below do not seem to support it in the chart while the 69XX series do.

 

[Griffolion]

DFPP is mainly used in the GPGPU applications found in scientific research etc. It is for where calculations that can be made in a parallel fashion also require high precision.

In terms of games, it isn't massively utilised as there is rarely any need to make such precise calculations. Also FP64 instruction set based calculations massively impact performance. As a general rule, games tend to get away with FP32 (single floating point) instruction set calculations.

 

[megamanx00]

Double precision is useless for games. It is important in models and simulations where a high degree of precision is important. Basically for stuff like fluid dynamics, modeling the weather or other aspects of a planet, modeling the sun, and other stuff we use super computers for. In these cases, 32-bit single precision is less accurate and thus leads to a less accurate model than double precision.

 

[amsga]

Best answer selected by amsga.

 

[enty1234]

Remember skyrim jumping dishes? KSP kraken? Thats where it goes, mm precision on 100's km's scale. Especially on physics engines.