Quake 2 on a 'stock' Atari Falcon

[Megol]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

nice, so they started converting it from floating point to integer, i don't know why it was ever in floating point to begin with to be honest.

floating point is overrated imho.

Quake 2 used floating point because it was (and is - for modern systems) faster than using integer math. Floating point also have advantages numerically which makes using integer math a really dumb choice unless optimizing for a specific platform.

Theoretically scaled integer math could be faster than floating point math however in practice it isn't. Just look at latency/throughput figures for modern processor cores.

Edit: The engine is extremely impressive and the thread describing different optimizations is a goldmine for optimization freaks.