Is an FPU really important?

[SamOS39]

I what situations would your amiga require/benefit from having an FPU?

And who wold buy an 030 turbo board which didnt have an FPU (or FPU option)?

... just a bit of market research ..  ;-)

cheers

Sam.

[jj]

If you didnt have an FPU yyou really would not miss it.

Hardly anything uses one

[jarrody2k]

SamOS39 wrote:
I what situations would your amiga require/benefit from having an FPU?

And who wold buy an 030 turbo board which didnt have an FPU (or FPU option)?

... just a bit of market research ..  ;-)

cheers

Sam.

It's generally 'multimedia' applications that use floating point operations.  3d calculations and image manipulation tend to be heavy in floating point.  3d games, raytracers, film compositing, image manipulation... anything of that sort.

Jarrod

- Edit - "Games" -> "3d games"

[SamOS39]

but if you had a graphics card then these kind of operations would be taken care of anyway..?

[bloodline]

jarrody2k wrote:

SamOS39 wrote:
I what situations would your amiga require/benefit from having an FPU?

And who wold buy an 030 turbo board which didnt have an FPU (or FPU option)?

... just a bit of market research ..  ;-)

cheers

Sam.

It's generally 'multimedia' applications that use floating point operations.  3d calculations and image manipulation tend to be heavy in floating point.  3d games, raytracers, film compositing, image manipulation... anything of that sort.

Jarrod

- Edit - "Games" -> "3d games"

99% of all Amiga software used Fixed point maths for this stuff... and occasionally provided an FPU version if they were feeling frisky...

Imagine3D provided two binaries like this... even with a nice fast full 040... The FPU version was much slower... so I really didn't see the point.

[darksun9210]

true, if you don't have one, you aren't missing out.
just some jpeg viewers, mpeg audio/video decoders, IIRC sme versions of ixemul.library use it... but they usually have integer math versions of the same stuff...
real3D, cinemar4D etc etc. ray tracing is helped by an FPU... i dunno if there are fpu/int varients of 3D game engines. pretty much all amiga 040's and 060's baring the apollo 75Mhz EC060's have fpus, so i dunno if stuff compiled for those class machines are assumed to have an FPU...
i've always bought an FPU if my machine could take one but didn't have one ... "just in case" there was something i wanted to run that could use it. i was kinda under the inpression it could accelerate things that needed it... :-D

[PaperMario]

fpu helps significantly, I played gloom the other day with floating pu and it worked much better than without it.
at least few fps's more.

[pVC]

Also decoding mp3 files (for burning audio-cd for example) gets little better quality with fpu version of decoder

But basically I'd say raytracers are the most important thing you might need fpu for. I just had to buy FPU for my ram expansion card when I bought my first a1200 in 1993. Just that I could use Real3D and Vista Pro. And I've had FPU always since then. 68881 (mbx1200) -> 68882 (b1230IV) -> 68060 (built-in).

[Nlandas]

SamOS39 wrote:
I what situations would your amiga require/benefit from having an FPU?

And who wold buy an 030 turbo board which didnt have an FPU (or FPU option)?

... just a bit of market research ..  ;-)

cheers

Sam.

What software do you use? Many programs that require intensive numeric calculations (such as image processing, raytracing, etc) can take advantage of the FPU through the math library. "If memory serves."

References -

What is an FPU?

Improving your Amiga's performance

[Rob]

Clickboom's port of Quake requires an FPU to run, as do some scene demos.

[SamOS39]

Thanks everyone for your input .. :-)

[tokyoracer]

I think it is, Doom is a fine example of FPU usage. It makes all the difference in gameplay.