This sort of floating-point optimization, while admittedly quite imprecise, actually does still see plenty of application in high performance, framerate-critical gaming. Especially games with require a robust physics package (my previous employment was at a now-defunct maker of hardware-accelerated physics products). For these gaming applications, or specifically for the graphics drivers they depend on, you're coding multi-threaded routines in proprietary instruction sets that run on a GPU, which is becoming more and more like a parallel vector processor.