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Nvidia Pascal GP100 GPU To Rock 4 TFLOPS Double Precision, 12 TFLOPS Single Precision Processing Power (techtimes.com)
New information emerged regarding Nvidia's Pascal GPU, covering the total compute performance of the much-anticipated FinFET-based chip. Based on a number of slides from an independent researcher, the Nvidia Pascal GPU100 features Stacked DRAM (1 TB/s) giving it as much as 12 TFLOPs of Single-Precision (FP32) compute performance. The flagship GPU is purportedly able to provide four TFLOPs of Double-Precision (FP64) compute performance as well.
True. In graphics single-precision is used because it is faster, but it means that some extra work is required to ensure loss of precision doesn't occur. Consider a flight simulator that wants precision of on millimeter over the circumference of the Earth. Single Precision Floating Point doesn't cut it, you have to use relative locations for rendering, you can't just use the full global coordinates you have. However, if the GPU is fast enough for double precision operations then you can do everything in global coordinates (eg.unmodified WGS-84).
Graphics will probably always choose the extra speed of single precision over the ease of use of double. But the advent of faster and faster consumer grade cards like this might start to change that for some applications. The competition between NVidia and AMD (and to a lesser extend, Intel) really benefits consumers and developers. The performance of this card is great news.