Pretty much. The CPU-intensive part was computational geometry. It certainly did not help that we were four programmers, and none of us had a strong background in math. I suggested once hiring a math-kahuna just to optimize the geometry-stuff, but money was rather tight. Also, the other programmers were very conservative. Once, an intern rewrote the geometry stuff using DirectX, so stuff like overlap detection for polygons could be offloaded to the graphics hardware, but my boss refused to adopt this into our code.
Also, we used a version of OpenWatcom that was rather old-ish even back then ("back then" being ~2007-2009), which knew nothing of SSE or stuff like that. Multi-core CPUs were around, but few if any of our customers used them, so multi threading was not really an option, either.
UPDATE: As a side note, I once tried recoding a few very simple but heavily-used utility functions in assembly. That was pretty much my only contact with raw assembly. When I compared my versions to what the compiler made of the C-version, they looked nearly identical. I never knew whether to be proud or ashamed of that. Then again, the assembly version was glaringly obvious... (For comparison, I also compiled those C functions with gcc, and the output looked nearly identical to my version.)
Also, we used a version of OpenWatcom that was rather old-ish even back then ("back then" being ~2007-2009), which knew nothing of SSE or stuff like that. Multi-core CPUs were around, but few if any of our customers used them, so multi threading was not really an option, either.
UPDATE: As a side note, I once tried recoding a few very simple but heavily-used utility functions in assembly. That was pretty much my only contact with raw assembly. When I compared my versions to what the compiler made of the C-version, they looked nearly identical. I never knew whether to be proud or ashamed of that. Then again, the assembly version was glaringly obvious... (For comparison, I also compiled those C functions with gcc, and the output looked nearly identical to my version.)