The hardware graphics acceleration stack is heavily shader-based now, so there's less and less graphics code being written in systems languages like C. In a way, people are still writing their own graphics engines, it's just for such a different platform from the unusual Turing-computer CPUs that all the old techniques go out of the window.
Nothing stopping you from writing it the old fashioned way though - you can just keep generating a single screen texture in the CPU and let the GPU idle!
As old dog I find this kind of funny, because for folks of my age C was like C# is seen nowadays.
Any serious game would be pure Assembly, and when using Pascal, C or BASIC compilers, they would be full of inline Assembly, almost like a poor man's macro Assembler, as the quality of code generation was awful.
Good point! Wasn't the Sony PlayStation significant for being the first console to ship with a C API from the manufacturer, or am I misremembering? I always thought that Net Yaroze sounded fantastic but never ended up getting one.
Oh, and another question on that topic: did you ever write self-modifying code for games, or had that already gone out by 2000?
Nothing stopping you from writing it the old fashioned way though - you can just keep generating a single screen texture in the CPU and let the GPU idle!