General data compression/decompression can also benefit from asm level tuning, including generic compression such as Huffman/zlib and more specific compression

General data compression/decompression can also benefit from asm level tuning, including generic compression such as Huffman/zlib and more specific compression like animation compression. MSVC is also a lot worse at vectorization than GCC or Clang and can more easily be beaten with asm. I would agree that direct asm is very rare these days in game engines outside of third-party libraries. There can be significant gains with tuned asm but some combination of intrinsics and ISPC is usually good enough. But it is far more useful to be able to _read_ assembly, for debugging in an optimized build or analyzing release crashes.