It doesn't suggest using integers. It suggests resetting your time uniform every 1000, 10000, 100000... etc. In values of ten raised to some (integer) power.

It doesn't suggest using integers. It suggests resetting your time uniform every 1000, 10000, 100000... etc. In values of ten raised to some (integer) power. The sole reason for picking a number like that is because programmers will tend to use constants like 32.768 instead of some fractional value. If you use 32.768 and reset your time uniform at 1000, the functions used with 32.768 will still loop seamlessly. Double precision operations are much slower on GPUs. This can get very bad indeed for certain optimizations, like LUTs. 32 bit integers can accumulate much more time delta than floats without precision errors, but have similar problems. You can pass in an integer and convert it to a float, but that doesn't really solve any problems. The accumulated time is being used in functions that noticeably change over a dozen milliseconds. The total accumulation is simply too large to for floats to represent with that precision; you would also need to convert most of the math surrounding the time uniform. It is a much better solution to limit the time uniform. The periodic functions depending on it are sensitive to millisecond changes and loop every 100-10000 milliseconds; there's no reason for time to ever be much larger than 10000.