This isn't necessarily game-specific. I'm not up to speed with current gen, but in the past the simple answer was "it depends", as usual. :-) There are times where doing some bit-twiddling hacks outperform branching, or where (partial) loop-unrolling is faster than the higher code density of a firm loop, but in the end for trivial cases, the compiler often, but not always, would do these things behind the scenes if you tell it what CPU you want to target. And if you really want the best performance in a particularly hot section, you just have to benchmark every possible implementation and pick on a case-by-case basis, or even provide two or three different implementations and pick the best one at runtime.