Just for your information: when calculating trig functions, you first modulo by 2 pi (this is called range reduction). Then you calculate the function, usually as a polynomial approximation, maybe piecewise.
But if it supports larger floats it must be doing range reduction which is impressive for low cycle ops. It must be done in hardware.
It doesn't surprise me regarding denorms. They're really nice numerically but always disabled when looking for performance!
Oh that range reduction. :) I’m aware of the technique, but thanks I did misunderstand what you were referring to. I don’t know what Nvidia hardware does exactly. For __sinf(), the CUDA guide says: “For x in [-pi,pi], the maximum absolute error is 2^(-21.41), and larger otherwise.” That totally doesn’t answer your question, it could still go either way, but it does kinda tend to imply that it’s best to keep the inputs in-range.
But if it supports larger floats it must be doing range reduction which is impressive for low cycle ops. It must be done in hardware.
It doesn't surprise me regarding denorms. They're really nice numerically but always disabled when looking for performance!