Original Post
I'm setting up a class for plots/graphs and using OpenGL to render. The idea is a big list of 3D vertices made of three doubles will be generated, and then the plot class will take the list and render it as a 3D plot. The vertices will be made of doubles, but since GPU's really only have 32-bit floats to work with, I'm wondering how to set things up with the least precision problems. My best thought so far is that for a 3D plot, I do glOrthod(xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax, zmin, zmax) where the x/y/z min/max variables specify the range to actually be plotted (and then call glVertex3d for each of the points to plot them). I figure this means the 3D space most exactly matches the data, so there will be less error. But because I'm ignorant of how OpenGL works, I don't know if that's actually true. I figure if I used a different range and then converted to that in software that would introduce some error, but maybe the GPU is doing this anyway? I'm not a floating point expert either, so maybe there's some range that would be best to use for the 3D space regardless of the range of the data?