This is mostly hardware dependent, but consider that the most common CPU (x86/x87 based) have internal FPU that operate on 80bits floating point precision (which exceeds both floats and doubles).
If you have to store in memory some intermediate calculations, double is the good average from internal precision and external space. Performance is more or less the same, on single values. It may be affected by the memory bandwidth on large numeric pipes (since they will have double length).
Consider that floats have a precision that approximate 6 decimal digits. On a N-cubed complexity problem (like a matrix inversion or transformation), you lose two or three more in mul and div, remaining with just 3 meaningful digits. On a 1920 pixel wide display they are simply not enough (you need at least 5 to match a pixel properly).
This roughly makes double to be preferable.
