My experience is just as an amateur, so it's only worth so much. I'm pretty sure though that the difference was much less than a factor of two.
Re:“CPUs are optimized for video games”
by loup-vaillant on Thursday August 11, 2016 @12:56AM
(#12266353)
Probably because double precision floats are just as fast as single precisions if you don't vectorise. I bet you didn't.
This would also explain for instance why many programming languages drop single precision floats altogether: they don't plan to vectorize in the first place.
Yeah, it looks like ODE doesn't use SIMD or anything, and hence performs poorly compared to more modern engines: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/03/Comparing-ODE-and-Bullet
The reason for this is simple -- it's twice as slow. The vector width is half the size, and so you can do half as many operations at a time.