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My experience is that it's extremely uncommon, including on physics systems. While I no longer work in games, I did for several years, I probably can count the times that I used double precision on one hand (if you exclude the JavaScript work that plagued the end of my game development career).

The reason for this is simple -- it's twice as slow. The vector width is half the size, and so you can do half as many operations at a time.



My experience is just as an amateur, so it's only worth so much. I'm pretty sure though that the difference was much less than a factor of two.


Probably because double precision floats are just as fast as single precisions if you don't vectorise. I bet you didn't.

This would also explain for instance why many programming languages drop single precision floats altogether: they don't plan to vectorize in the first place.


Yeah, it looks like ODE doesn't use SIMD or anything, and hence performs poorly compared to more modern engines: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/03/Comparing-ODE-and-Bullet




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