this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Especially these days. Current-gen x86 architecture has all kinds of insane optimizations and special instruction sets that the Pentium I never had (e.g. SSE). You really do need a higher-level compiler at your back to make the most of it these days. And even then, there are cases where you have to resort to inline ASM or processor-specific intrinsics to optimize to the level that Roller Coaster Tycoon is/was. (original system specs)
I might be wrong, but doesn't SSE require you to explicitly use it in C/C++? Laying out your data as arrays and specifically calling the SIMD operations on them?
There’s absolutely nothing you can do in C that you can’t also do in assembly. Because assembly is just the bunch of bits that the compiler generates.
That said, you’d have to be insane to write a game featuring SIMD instructions these days in assembly.