Desktop applications requiring high performance also use C++. Photoshop (and perhaps many parts of the Adobe suite?), and Tableau come to mind.

Your intuition about gc pauses is correct, when you have to push frames every 15-30 miliseconds, you can't afford any kind of unexpected pausing. Game devs also use a huge number of hacks to hit their performance targets, something that using c/c++ makes much easier due to their relative looseness.