I would take it one step further, often trying to eke out performance gains with clever tricks can hurt performance by causing you to "miss the forest for the trees".
I work with Cuda kernels a lot for computer vision. I am able to consistently and significantly improve on the performance of research code without any fancy tricks, just with good software engineering practices.
By organising variables into structs, improving naming, using helper functions, etc... the previously impenetrable code becomes so much clearer and the obvious optimisations reveal themselves.
Not to say there aren't certain tricks / patterns / gotchas / low level hardware realities to keep in mind, of course.
I work with Cuda kernels a lot for computer vision. I am able to consistently and significantly improve on the performance of research code without any fancy tricks, just with good software engineering practices.
By organising variables into structs, improving naming, using helper functions, etc... the previously impenetrable code becomes so much clearer and the obvious optimisations reveal themselves.
Not to say there aren't certain tricks / patterns / gotchas / low level hardware realities to keep in mind, of course.