There are lots of writings about technical and architectural reasons code in games performs better than code in GP applications, but people often forget the top

There are lots of writings about technical and architectural reasons code in games performs better than code in GP applications, but people often forget the top level reason: they have clear performance targets right from the start and performance is the most obvious thing (right after "not crashing") that you see about how well a game works. Everything follows from this. It's not that game devs are so much cleverer than other devs, they are just faced with first hand feedback of "does the game code hit the frametime budget" constantly and the whole dev org is committed to that.