It turns out that fp16 is still useful for the reasons it was originally useful back in the days of D3D9: it’s a good way to improve throughput on a limited transitor/power budget, and the smaller storage size means that you can store more values in general purpose registers without having your thread occupancy suffer due to register pressure. As of Nvidia’s new Turing architecture (AKA the RTX 2000 series), AMD’s Vega (AKA gfx900, AKA GCN 5) series1 and Intel’s Gen8 architecture (used in Broadwell) fp16 is now back in the desktop world. Which means that us desktop graphics programmers now have to deal with it again. And of course if you’re a mobile developer, it never really left in the first place. But how do you actually use fp16 in your shader code? That’s exactly what this blog will explain!