(author here) I think it's not useful to eliminate branches in hot loops. These games have giant instruction footprints and a high branch rate. A loop will prob

(author here) I think it's not useful to eliminate branches in hot loops. These games have giant instruction footprints and a high branch rate. A loop will probably fit within the L1 BTB and uop cache, and probably won't benefit from eliminating branches. Exception would be a branch that's near impossible to predict, like one that depends on a randomly generated value or otherwise doesn't correlate well with global history.