Fixed point uses a lot less power though, and many use cases are effectively power limited rather than functional-unit limited, since if you really do fill all functional units on every cycle you'll soon need to throttle back your clock speed...
Perhaps a good example of that is video encoding, which is mostly fixed point, despite it looking like a pretty close fit for floating point maths.
A very good point. My worldview of performance is highly biased towards “full steam ahead” desktop graphics.
Video encoding is a bit of a special case though because the common algorithms are carefully designed for hardware acceleration. For most rendering, it doesn’t make sense to go out of your way to avoid the FPU.
Perhaps a good example of that is video encoding, which is mostly fixed point, despite it looking like a pretty close fit for floating point maths.