It's very popular in hardware-accelerated computer graphics. It has much more range, and a bit more precision, than the traditional integer 8-bits-per-channel r

It's very popular in hardware-accelerated computer graphics. It has much more range, and a bit more precision, than the traditional integer 8-bits-per-channel representation of colour, so it is used for High Dynamic Range framebuffers and textures. It's also ubiquitous as an arithmetic type in mobile GPU shaders, where it's used for things (like colours) that need to be floats but don't need full 32-bit precision. In many cases it doesn't just save memory bandwidth and register space, but also the shader core may have higher throughput for half precision.