64 bit doubles break down pretty quickly when zooming into the Mandelbrot: you can zoom in by 2x about 64 times. Doubles only get you twice the zoom level as 32

64 bit doubles break down pretty quickly when zooming into the Mandelbrot: you can zoom in by 2x about 64 times. Doubles only get you twice the zoom level as 32 bit floats, meaning with fp32, you can zoom 2x about 32 times. I feel like using doubles makes zooming a little better but isn’t all that meaningful of an improvement over floats. You can use arbitrary precision, and yes it will be an exercise in patience (both in coding and in waiting for Mandel to render), but there are some really crazy tricks for deep zooming into Mandel that don’t use arbitrary precision, tricks that I know of but don’t understand yet. I’ve seen hints on some of the Mandel deep-zoom videos on YouTube, and also on ShaderToy. BTW I wrote a 128 bit quad-float emulator for ShaderToy, and it seems that it’s somewhere around 100x slower than using floats. It was a very fun exercise.