One Line, Three Tricks: Unpacking a Quake 1 Gem

https://godbolt.org/z/sbzPT33nq

“quake” version uses “lea" to pre-increment pointers before storing values. “normal” version uses “add" after storing values.

The “lea" instruction is often faster because it performs an addition in a single cycle without modifying flags, whereas “add" may introduce a dependency.

“quake” version might have a slight edge due to better pipeline efficiency.

“lea" is often preferred over “add" in performance-critical code because it is a single-cycle instruction on modern x86 CPUs.