Comment by qingcharles

The issue is that the algorithm is only half the story. The implementation (e.g. bytecode) is the other.

I've been trying to find ways to make the original graphics renderer of the CGA version of Elite faster as there have been dozens of little optimizations found over the decades since it was written.

I was buoyed by a video of Super Mario 64/Zelda optimizations where it was pointed out that sometimes an approx calculation of a trig value can be quicker than a table lookup depending on the architecture.

Based on that I had conversations with LLMs over what fast trig algorithms there are, but for 8088 you are cooked most of the time on implementing them at speed.