Double precision floating point operations are not required for any known or anticipated GPU compute applications for consumers (i.e. gaming, multimedia, and productivity), where single precision processing is sufficient. Implementing high performance DP FP processing in hardware carries significant costs in terms of die size and power consumption, and wouldn’t provide any value to the vast majority of our customers. This is the main reason why all of the companies who participated in the definition of the new industry standard OpenCL and DirectCompute APIs agreed to make this an optional feature.

That being said, there are some high performance computing applications in the scientific or industrial fields where double precision can be beneficial, so we chose to include that capability in our most powerful GPUs to provide an attractive solution for those markets as well.
- Antal Tungler