It's analagous to optimizations for resource-starved systems. If you have trouble processing 16 of something, you don't really benefit from improving the O(n) a

It's analagous to optimizations for resource-starved systems. If you have trouble processing 16 of something, you don't really benefit from improving the O(n) at the cost of higher overhead, you benefit from the same algorithm processing each item twice as fast. Linear micro-optimizations rule the world. Being able to use lots of tools and hybridize your engineering to get relatively bigger savings is a result of having the headroom for algorithmic complexity to start ruling, which for video might be a relatively recent phenomenon(I don't actually know the domain).