StarRTS

I've always wanted to benchmark Starcraft 1 to compare Pentium vs Cyrix CPUs. I decided to throw Claude Code at the job and it has written me a little command line Win 95 benchmark tool that should replicate Starcraft/RTS style logic paths.

Mid/late-90s Socket 7 CPUs (Intel Pentium / P55C, AMD K6 / K6-2, Cyrix 6x86 / MII, IDT WinChip) all claim "Pentium-class" performance but diverge sharply in real workloads — integer pipeline width, FPU throughput, L1 cache size, write-combining, and MMX support all differ. Generic benchmarks (Dhrystone, CPU-Z) don't capture which of these chips actually played the era's games well. StarCraft 1 (1998, Win95, DirectX 5, 16 MB min RAM) is the canonical workload because it leans on exactly the operations where these CPUs diverge: integer-heavy pathfinding, 8bpp sprite blits to a DirectDraw back-buffer, 16.16 fixed-point unit physics, and fog-of-war tilemap updates.

First Release - StarRTS Bench v0.1

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/File:Starrtsbench01.zip

Michael Results

Ryzen 7 7700 - Windows 11 - Not clean boot - 380424 - Work PC

Ryzen 7 7800X - Windows 11 - Not clean boot - 370151 - Home PC

Pentium 233 MMX - Windows 98se - 3212