However, although more difficult to implement, saturation arithmetic has numerous practical advantages.

For example, saturation arithmetic so that the sum of two bright pixels does not 'wrap around' into dark values.

Additionally, saturation arithmetic enables efficient algorithms for many problems, particularly in digital signal processing.

On the other hand, the saturation arithmetic operations in MMX could significantly speed up some digital signal processing applications.

Saturation arithmetic for integers has also been implemented in software for a number of programming languages including C, C++, Eiffel.

Saturation arithmetic is a version of arithmetic in which all operations such as addition and multiplication are limited to a fixed range between a minimum and maximum value.

Saturation arithmetic operations are available on many modern platforms, and in particular was one of the extensions made by the Intel MMX platform, specifically for such signal processing applications.

There is another potential problem if the stencil buffer does not have enough bits to accommodate the number of shadows visible between the eye and the object surface, because it uses saturation arithmetic.

SARITH: Safe ARITHmetic - A Progress Report: Report on a saturation arithmetic component for Eiffel.

Saturation arithmetic, in which operations that produce overflows will accumulate at the maximum (or minimum) values that the register can hold rather than wrapping around (maximum+1 doesn't overflow to minimum as in many general-purpose CPUs, instead it stays at maximum).

Typically, early computer microprocessors did not implement integer arithmetic operations using saturation arithmetic; instead, they used the easier-to-implement modular arithmetic, in which values exceeding the maximum value "wrap around" to the minimum value, like the hours on a clock passing from 12 to 1.