[ms4720]

Why is it suprising? There is no real need for people writing hand tuned assembly any more. And great optimized assembly code can work like crap on next gen of chip. Why bother?

[thyrsus]

At what level should one code to be confident the backend will do proper chip-specific optimization? RTL? Or is that already too low level?

[0des]

demoscene is timeless

[pjmlp]

Most of the demoscene fun nowadays is fragment shader competitions.