Rumour: Sony's PS5 is definitely more powerful than Microsoft Project Scarlett

[DonFerrari]

the-pi-guy said:

DonFerrari said:

Read "the-pi-guy" answer, on Assembly translating to what I said. You may claim it is a false statement, I would say it is at most imprecise.

And I don't remember any 3rd party going this route to optimize their code, nor any MS dev, not even other Sony devs on PS3. No other company was looking this deep in tailoring the code. That was even the reason gave for why the remaster took so long to be made when compared to other ports from PS3 to PS4.

That also doesn't deny the fact that MS going for multiplat on PCs with DirectX will probably use less of low level specialized code for Xbox on their games.

I can't say for sure how common assembly is in the average dev house.  But smaller studios are definitely not going to be doing very much assembly if any at all.  Bigger devs will do some.  How much, I can't say.  

I wouldn't be surprised if Naughty Dog does more assembly than the average developer, they work closely with ICE, and they have their own developers as well.  

@bold To be fair, a big part of that is that most devs don't talk very in depth about what they've done with the engine.  Most game engines are kept on a tight leash for what is known about them.  

drkohler said:
Time critical stuff is always programmed in Assembly language. Other stuff might be, too, if you have talented "Hand Assemblers" in your code grouip. As compilers mature over time, less and less code is hand assembled. That rule applies to everything, not only consoles. Of course, writing in Assembler takes more time and is more error prone than simply using a high-level language, hence one tries to stay away from it as much as possible.

Yep.  Some of the optimizations that compilers can make are ridiculously impressive.  

For 3rd parties I see very little reason for they to use it, because they would need to really "do the game" specially to PS3, then to X360 and then to PC (where they wouldn't be able to optimize through assembly since there would be a plethora of different HW arrangements). Plus the gains while impressive in the case of ND perhaps wouldn't be worth the hassle and cost for most devs (I love ND game, and for me their graphics were a notch ahead of everyone else, but not enough to really demand that everyone gone similar route).