I've tried to write a space game, and let me tell you, 32 bit floating point is woefully inadequate. Unfortunately, most 3D hardware at the time was built around 32 bit floats. Those only give you about 1 in 100,000 resolution. I had to create scaled-down "billboards" for nearby celestial objects and park them 1000's of kilometers away. (When they were actually 10's or 100's of kilometers away.)
Even 64 bits wouldn't allow for a naive implementation of a realistically scaled space game. There would still have to be a lot of optimization tricks played.
EDIT: I realize that the parents posts are talking about Integers, but you can't send those directly to the GPU!
Even 64 bits wouldn't allow for a naive implementation of a realistically scaled space game. There would still have to be a lot of optimization tricks played.
EDIT: I realize that the parents posts are talking about Integers, but you can't send those directly to the GPU!