Compilers are pretty damn good at doing that by now.
I can believe there’s some direct assembly usage down in the depths of Unity and Unreal engines, but the average game dev is probably not going to touch it.
I’d agree that the average game dev is on Unity or unreal and won’t be hand optimizing any inner loops.
But there are a surprising amount of studios still on their own tech and there the low-level engineers definitely do (I’ve worked in the industry and have seen it first hand - and done it myself).
It also tends to be at the start of a console’s life span before the compiler and linker is mature up against the hardware.
Compilers are pretty damn good at doing that by now.
I can believe there’s some direct assembly usage down in the depths of Unity and Unreal engines, but the average game dev is probably not going to touch it.
I’d agree that the average game dev is on Unity or unreal and won’t be hand optimizing any inner loops.
But there are a surprising amount of studios still on their own tech and there the low-level engineers definitely do (I’ve worked in the industry and have seen it first hand - and done it myself).
It also tends to be at the start of a console’s life span before the compiler and linker is mature up against the hardware.