Those days still exist! If you want your mind blown watch the Epic Games Nanite talk from last year's SIGGRAPH where the core rendering of the dense vertex data is done directly in Compute , IE software rendered, instead of using the hardware rasterization hardware which has a minimum 4 pixel invocation overhead which gets expensive with very small triangles.
This is but one example of this that's happening every day, there is much much more like hair rendering in EA FIFA soccer or automatic trading financial software running on GPUs.
There's a whole world of applications where people are still concerned with every last cycle of performance just like in the C64 days.
This is but one example of this that's happening every day, there is much much more like hair rendering in EA FIFA soccer or automatic trading financial software running on GPUs.
There's a whole world of applications where people are still concerned with every last cycle of performance just like in the C64 days.