can confirm fast math makes the biggest difference
I recall it totally fudged up the ray-axis aligned bounding box intersection routine in the raytracer I worked on. The routine relied on infinities being handled correctly, and -ffast-math broke that.
I see the linked article goes into that aspect in detail, wish I had it back then.
IIRC we ended up disabling it for just that file, as it did speed up the rest my a fair bit.