A while back, I was working on a fun little video game side project which used BMI2 instructions to compute Morton codes on the critical path.

Voxels were stored in a buffer sorted in Morton order. The idea was to balance performance improvements realized by increased spatial locality against the cost of computing the Morton codes. The trade-off was only worthwhile on Intel because of the use of pdep/pext in optimized encode/decode functions.

I imagine something similar would probably apply to texture lookups in a software 3D renderer.