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Even Faster asin() Was Staring Right At Me

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Even Faster asin() Was Staring Right At Me is a March 2026 follow-up blog post on 16BPP.net that further optimizes a Cg-style arcsine polynomial approximation for CPU ray tracing.

It rewrites Horner evaluation of the Cg asin minimax coefficients using Estrin's scheme so independent multiply-adds can run in parallel on out-of-order CPUs. The article reports microbenchmarks across Intel, AMD, and Apple M4 with GCC, Clang, and MSVC, then measures a small gain in the author's PSRayTracing path tracer, while noting the result remains an approximation.

It is for intermediate graphics and systems programmers who care about scalar math hot paths and can follow C++ polynomial factoring and instruction-level parallelism.

The post is a free HTML article with code listings and links to the broader asin approximation series.

It is useful as a concrete case study in algebraic rewrite plus measurement on an already fast approximation.