Fixed-point arithmetic: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:00, 2 November 2005

Revision as of 22:06, 15 November 2005

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[[C plus plus|C++]] that do not include such support built-in.

Here are some examples of fixed-point representations==Examples still in common use:==

# [[GnuCash]] is an application for tracking money. It is written in C and switched from a floating-point representation of money to a fixed-point implementation as of version 1.6. This change was made to avoid the potential rounding errors of floating-point representations.

# [[Tremor (software)|Tremor]] and [[Toast (disambiguationGSM)|Toast]] are software libraries that decode the [[Vorbis|Ogg Vorbis]] and [[Full Rate|GSM Full Rate]] audio formats respectively. These codecs use fixed-point arithmetic because many audio decoding hardware devices do not have an FPU (to save money) and audio decoding requires enough performance that a software implementation of floating-point on low-speed devices would not produce output in real time.

# All [[3D computer graphics|3D graphics]] engines on Sony's original [[PlayStation]] and Nintendo's [[Game Boy Advance]] and [[Nintendo DS]] video game systems use fixed-point arithmetic for the same reason as Tremor and Toast: to gain throughput on an architecture without an FPU.

# [[Fractint]] represents numbers as Q3:29 fixed-point numbers[http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/periodicity.html#integer_math_anchor].