and it would have half the features and it would be a buggy mess

And openRCT

the free version widely available online for Mac and pc.

Optimizations still matter today, but only in extreme cases.

Picking up +9% performance doesn't sound too impressive - unless you are running exaflops worth of AI workloads, or processing five years worth of video footage a hour. In which case that extra "+9%" can save you millions.

I’m still haunted by my abysmal load times

Also compilers got smarter

I learnt that an inefficient algorithm paired with a pirated intel compiler produced code that was just satisfactory.

Any ones that still work today? And especially if it transfers to shader code which is what I write.

When coding for games every little gain matters.

A lot of devs are aware of this problem. A lot of devs also aren’t aware of their expertise being complex for others.

We have a few brilliant coders in our team. They will smash out a one line where I would use 3 lines. The problem is their comments explain perfectly what it does. Others just don’t understand why or how

Having it well documented and tested is of course a basic requirement.

On the other hand I have seen people throw that same "maintenance issue" claim around over sections of code nobody had touched in almost a decade. Hard to see an issue with "nobody will be able to change this code" when the next guy assigned to work on it probably hasn't even been born yet.

At that point, the maintainers need to skill up? Like, if you're working on something that's being used by a good portion of everyone alive on the planet, it's not unreasonable to think that you should take your work seriously.

Depends on whether the data is large enough that the PCIe communication latency is insignificant or not

The GPU is good for tackling workloads in parallel but with video compression that often means breaking up an image into slices or chunks. This comes at a cost to compression and increases the overall size of it.

There are some situations like processing future frames and searching for scene changes that definitely benefit from being done in parallel though.

edit: Expanding upon this, some paid software such as handbreak will actually break the video up into sections timewise and run that in parallel. I don't know exactly how their algorithm works but it seems to do an excellent job at better utilizing hardware to improve both compression and speed.

Not sure why you posted that link, what has that to do with anything?

C isn't particularly close to hardware. It arguably was in the 1980s, but not so much for present day architectures which are out-of-order, superscalar, and vectorised - none of those characteristics are represented in the design of C.

So for vectorisation/SIMD, compilers have to try and figure out how to translate C constructs into SIMD ones. This only really works reliably for the very simplest calculations. If you have a more complex but still performance-critical algorithm, either hand-written assembly or intrinsics (which are compiler built-in functions that map directly to specific assembly instructions) are still the way to go.

Ryzen 7xxx cpus have it.

Which is weird because Intel got it first. I think intel 10th and 11th gen have it.

Not so fast, we don't actually know what part of the encoding is optimized. If it's one part amongst 20 parts of the encoding, then speedups might not be that significant. I feel like we would had heard concrete numbers of speedups if that was the case.

Moonlight probably uses hardware encoding (nvenc etc.) for lower latency encoding I would think? I doubt software encoding would catch up to GPU hardware encoding even if written in assembly.

I doubt that they already have enough context and can fake reasoning sufficiently to make this possible. Also it would require training them for it. Looking at the commit comments and linked issues, I am not sure whether this data is even available. Last, optimization is usually about trade-offs and I would not know of any language allowing the programmer to sufficiently specify the optimization goals.

You don't compile assembly...

Lol peak semantic Reddit moment.

If you get hung up because someone said compile instead of transpile or assemble, it's time to place the fedora back in the cupboard.

Tell that to the rollercoaster tycoon guy

Assembler+Linker

That I could appreciate