The issue seems to be that the infinite sum is truncated too early when x is in the extreme upper tail. An easily validated improvement to to dnchisq.c would be to add an additional requirement in the upper tail while condition, that the summation should continue while the additive term remains too big a fraction of the saddlepoint density. Here is replacement code that partially offsets the time required for addtional terms in the sum by calculating x*ncp2 only once instead of repeating it in every iteration of both loops. x2 = x * ncp2 /* upper tail */ term = mid; df = dfmid; i = imax; s = 0.5 - (dx+sqrt(dx*dx+4*ncp/x))*0.25 /* saddlepoint */ s2 = 1-2*s termlimit = exp(ncp*s/s2 - log(s2)*df*0.5 - s*x - log((df+2*ncp+4*ncp*s/s2)/(s2*s2)*pi) - log(2)*2**54) /* saddlepoint density * 2^-53 */ do { i++; q = x2 / i / df; df += 2; term *= q; sum += term; } while (q >= 1 || term * q > (1-q)*eps || term > termlimit); /* lower tail */ term = mid; df = dfmid; i = imax; while ( i ){ df -= 2; q = i * df / x2; i--; term *= q; sum += term; if (q < 1 && term * q <= (1-q)*eps) break; } Jerry [[alternative HTML version deleted]]