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by CamperBob2 1862 days ago
An IIR filter will always beat an FFT, but the most efficient way to implement longer FIR kernels is often with a WOLA or similar "streaming" FFT filter implementation. At some point, it takes fewer cycles to do N*log(N) multiplication in the frequency domain than to do N^2 multiplications to convolve in the time domain.

The crossover point will be system-dependent and heavily influenced by overhead, but a crude WAG might be in the vicinity of 64- to 128-wide kernels. There is no question of one implementation being "better" than the other, they are capable of identical results if implemented accordingly.