Editing Fixed-point arithmetic (section)

==Software application examples==
* The popular [[TrueType]] font format uses  32-bit signed binary fixed-point with 26 bits to the left of the decimal for some numeric values in its instructions.<ref name="TTS"/> This format was chosen to provide the minimal amount of precision required for [[hinting]] and for performance reasons.<ref name="Freetype"/>
* With the exception of the [[Nintendo 64]], all 3D games for the [[fifth generation of video game consoles]], including the [[3DO]], [[PlayStation (console)|PlayStation]], [[Sega Saturn]], and [[Atari Jaguar]]<ref name="Dolphin_2014"/> use fixed-point arithmetic, as the systems lack hardware floating-point units. The PlayStation transformation coprocessor supports 16-bit fixed point with 12 fraction bits - whereas the Sega Saturn VDP coprocessors used a 32-bit fixed point format reserving the lower 16 bits for the fractional part.
* The [[TeX]] typesetting software, widely used by scientists and mathematicians, uses 32-bit signed binary fixed point with 16 fraction bits for all position calculations. The values are interpreted as fractions of a [[point (typography)|typographer's point]]. [[TeX font metric]] files use 32-bit signed fixed-point numbers, with 12 fraction bits.
* [[Tremor (software)|Tremor]], [[Toast (GSM)|Toast]] and [[MPEG Audio Decoder|MAD]] are software libraries which decode the [[Ogg Vorbis]], [[GSM Full Rate]] and [[MP3]] audio formats respectively. These codecs use fixed-point arithmetic because many audio decoding hardware devices do not have an FPU.
* The [[WavPack]] lossless audio compressor uses fixed point arithmetic. The choice was justified by, among other things, the worry that different floating-point rounding rules in different hardware could corrupt the lossless nature of the compression.<ref name="WavPack"/>
* The Nest Labs Utilities library,<ref name="nlu"/> provides a limited set of macros and functions for fixed point numbers, particularly when dealing with those numbers in the context of sensor sampling and sensor outputs.
* The [[OpenGL ES]] 1.x specification includes a fixed point profile, as it is an API aimed for embedded systems, which do not always have an FPU.
* The [[dc (computer program)|dc]] and [[bc programming language|bc]] programs are [[arbitrary precision]] calculators, but only keep track of a (user-specified) fixed number of fractional digits.
* [[Fractint]] represents numbers as [[Q (number format)|Q2.29]] fixed-point numbers,<ref name="Fractint_2005"/> to speed up drawing on old PCs with [[Intel 80386|386]] or [[486SX]] processors, which lacked an FPU.
* ''[[Doom (1993 video game)|Doom]]'' was the last [[first-person shooter]] game by [[id Software]] to use a 16.16 fixed point representation for all of its non-integer computations, including map system, geometry, rendering, and player movement. This representation is still used in modern [[List of Doom source ports|''Doom'' source port]]s.
* The [[Q Sharp|Q#]] programming language for the [[Microsoft Azure Quantum|Azure quantum computer]]s, that implement [[quantum logic gates]], contains a standard numeric library for performing fixed-point arithmetic on [[quantum register|registers]] of [[qubit]]s.<ref name="Quantum"/>