What requires an FPU?

[Piru]

Lightwave 3D, Imagine, Aladdin 4D, etc.
All 3D gfx apps.

Pagestream, Art Expression, WordWorth, FinalWriter etc.
All 2D Desktop Publishing apps.

Mp3 players, .ogg players, video players, anything that lossy compresses or decompresses audio or video.

Anything that handles postscript or truetype fonts.

I'm fairly sure that most of these do not require an FPU. Only some very specific apps have been compiled by using the FPU instructions directly.

they really need an FPU, especially during printing, for smooth-scaling the scalable fonts.

There's nothing in scalable fonts that'd require FPU.

[Piru]

As a practical matter, all good mp3 players use floating point. You need the FPU for speed reasons.  No FPU = too slow to be useful. There are integer mp3 sourcecodes available but they generate sloppy sound.  It says so right in the readme file.

Actually that is not the case. See: http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/

libmad is used in a replacement MPEGA.library for amiga, resulting in significantly faster decoding than when using FPU: http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/mpega_libmad

[Piru]

FPU version is more accurate but slower than integer version!
See the readme for mpega.library here:
http://fi.aminet.net/util/libs/mpega_library.readme
 

You realize this is a different code base than the libmad MPEGA library linked before? Just because the original integer MPEGA.library accuracy is lower doesn't mean that this would be some kind of generic rule. The original interger MPEGA.library just sucks. From the libmad MPEGA.library readme:

Code: [Select]

- Very high quality decoding (better than the FPU version of the original).

[Piru]

of course the faster version is the integer used to play and the fpu version is for precision

Incorrect. The most precise one is the libmad integer MPEGA.library.