1. First steps in Reaktor Core - Native Instruments

7. More signal types
7.1. Float signals
The most common signal type used for DSP (digital signal processing) on modern
personal computers is floating point (float for short). Floats can represent
a wide range of values, as large as 10 38 (in 32 bit mode) or even 10 308 (in 64
bit mode). As useful as they are, floats have a drawback – limited precision.
The precision is higher in 64 bit mode, but it is still limited.
The precision of float values is limited for technical reasons. If it
weren’t limited, float values would require an infinite amount of
memory to store and processing them would require an infinitely
fast CPU. It’s similar to the impossibility of writing the full decimal
representation of a transcendental number, such as π, on a finite
piece of paper. Even if you can somehow compute all the digits
(which is not always possible for transcendental numbers), you
will eventually run out of paper (and time).
The signals and memory storage that we have been discussing so far use 32
bit floating point numbers for their representation. Reaktor Core also offers
the possibility of using 64 bit floats, should you need higher precision (or a
larger value range, although it’s difficult to imagine that 10 -38 to 10 38 is not
a large enough range).
By default all processing in Reaktor Core is done in 32 bit floats. This
doesn’t exactly mean that the signals are really processed as 32 bit
floats, but rather that at minimum, 32 bit floats will be used for processing
(although 64 bit floats may occasionally be used for intermediate
results).
You can change the floating point precision for individual modules as well as
for whole macros. For individual modules you do so in the module’s FP Precision
(floating point precision) property:
110 – REAKTOR CORE