[fao_]

Unrelated but wrt. modern rendering versus 90s rendering I'd imagine that a lot of the performance shims used in the 90s might not apply because the critical problem is different.

Performance based development these days isn't so much on maximizing usage of the cycles of the machine (I mean, ok fundamentally it's still about that, but-), rather it's about getting the microcode to do the right thing. E.g. LUTs being extremely bad for caching performance. Branch predictions being a much more important predictor of performance than anything else. Huge rams make a lot of old tips around ram size usage invalid. SIMD / vector based operations and threading are a boon but require a very different way of working

[p1necone]

Even if your mental model is as simple as "CPU processing + L1 cache is infinitely fast, having to fetch data from anywhere else is dog slow" you'll be able to optimize code pretty well given the characteristics of modern processors.

[leowbattle]

If modern high performance code relies on making the microcode do "the right thing", and making sure the right data is in cache then why don't CPU manufacturers allow control over such things?

[beagle3]

What’s right for today’s CPU is horrible for next year’s in those terms - and also the other way around.