Citation needed indeed. It's logically equivalent to an if/else and the compiler probably knows that.
That sounds like someone may be thinking about the conditional-move and family on some CPU instructions. That could certainly interact with the branch prediction, but there's nothing about the operators that necessitate it.
Sure, it may be that some compilers do generate different code and some runs faster than others, but that's just not the kind of thing you can tell without benchmarking those very specific conditions. If you're writing a ray tracer, you're probably are going to want to hand-tune the assembly but that's not the common case of C and C++ programming.
That sounds like someone may be thinking about the conditional-move and family on some CPU instructions. That could certainly interact with the branch prediction, but there's nothing about the operators that necessitate it.
Sure, it may be that some compilers do generate different code and some runs faster than others, but that's just not the kind of thing you can tell without benchmarking those very specific conditions. If you're writing a ray tracer, you're probably are going to want to hand-tune the assembly but that's not the common case of C and C++ programming.