Add new comment

A pointless argument

The argument of which produces the better quality is pointless. You can produce the same quality with integers as you can with floating points as long as you use a sufficient amount of bits for your maths. One can use integers to implement floating points and it is a common practise on hardware that has no float point operations.

If you do not know how to use integers efficiently then you will need to use float points, of course. It is what floating points were designed for as these take care of precision issues through a non-fixed, floating representation so that you do not have to.

The argument between integer versus floating points, however, is still about speed. Integer operations are often faster, because they can use less bits and they allow you to trade quality for speed in addition.

I suggest that you use floating points. The speed difference between integers and floating points is often not huge, especially when instruction sets like SSE can be used and most compilers will try to use these automatically. Writing, debugging and maintaining precise integer code on the other hand is more difficult and as a result are integers mostly used when quality is not an issue.