practical reasons for learning assembly

I've been learning MIPS assembly and I'm wondering if there's any practical uses for it. Is there a lot of demand for people who write assembly these days? I've seen some job postings online looking for people to help write/debug embedded systems, but it doesn't seem like it's a very profitable skill to have compared to more high level stuff.

>>4

It's not even used in videogames anymore really. With OpenGL and DirectX, there's no need to write 3d rendering routines in assembly like there used to be. The GPU, the drivers, and the API handle all of that at much higher speed and with greater compatibility (well, with opengl anyway)

However it is used extensively for cracking videogames as well as other software and it is necessary to know the basics of assembly for reverse engineering and writing fast code for embedded devices.

x86 assembly can be useful in certain scenarios; MIPS assembly is mostly worthless though. They teach it in schools because its easier to learn than x86 assembly.