Do you have some evidence for this claim? I'm not saying I disagree -- indeed, I suspect it might be true -- but I'd appreciate some evidence to back it up.
Starcraft 2 came out in 2007. These are the original system requirements. https://www.lifewire.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty-requi...
I remember receiving the game as a gift and having to tell my grandma that my single core PC wouldn't be able to play it. I think my PC was only 3 years old at the time, not even 6.
Blizzard announced they were making SC2 in 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II:_Wings_of_Liberty... there wasn't even a closed beta until early 2010.
Regardless, the minimum requirements you posted are single core CPU's.
* 1998: 32-bit, 500 MHz, single core, 128MiB of RAM IIRC (we later upgraded it to ~500 MiB). 7 GB of disk.
* 2007: 64-bit, ~2.5 MHz, dual core, 4, later 8 GiB of RAM. Hundreds of GB of disk.
There's essentially an order of magnitude improvement…
But around 2000 I remember always carefully looking at the system requirements section of games to check which of those would work on my 2-3 year old computer and for which my machine is too old -- and find a significant rejection rate (25-50%).
While there are limits, the scaling largely held up over time. A game that ran at 15 fps (60 fps wasn't really a thing back then, usually you hit 15-30 fps) would be 32x faster 7.5 years later. Ditto with most software.
The vast majority of speedup, from a processing standpoint, these days is all from increased parallelism (via more cores, or more SIMD-like instructions in the core), and because of Amdahl's "law", it can be very difficult to see benefits from increased parallelism.
We're still seeing Moore's law for drive space, RAM, and somewhat bus speeds, and that's also where you get a lot more speedup.
> We're still seeing Moore's law for drive space,
Not really. 2Tb became a standard a long time ago, and it didn't change afterwards. Speed did not improve much either, especially latency (it cannot really improve), except by switching to SSDs, but then you lose capacity, so it is not a continuous improvement.
> RAM, and somewhat bus speeds, and that's also where you get a lot more speedup.
SDRAM is slow as molasses, as far as latency is concerned (the "Random Access" in R.A.M.). The improvements have been incredibly small in this domain. DDR4 access times are slower than SRAM access time from perhaps 20 years ago. It has however much larger capacity and larger throughput, indeed.
> and somewhat bus speeds, and that's also where you get a lot more speedup.
Same problem with buses, their frequency raised a lot, but that happened with switching from parallel to serial buses, leading to a lot of latency (and overload), not only on the bus itself because of the protocol, but also before and after because you need to serialise and then deserialise the data for you need it in a parallel form anyway.
For example, the first SATA, despite its impressive frequency of 1.5 GHz, did not do better than the good old IDE/PATA with the latest UDMA.
Same for PCI Express, it showed 2.5 GHz frequency, but its performance was not better than AGP or top PCI with their < 100 Mhz frequencies.
Then to improve the throughput you had to add multiple lines of serial buses, which again add some need for synchronisation and thus extra latency.
Yeah, that would be pretty crummy in 2007 even if you'd bought a high end system in 2001. If it was entry level, forget it.
I mean you'd still be able to compute things in 2007, but the overall experience would be sub-par. And a lot of things would run technically, but it would be painful enough you wouldn't even want to bother.
My take on it is that multi-core CPU's caused the amount of computing power available on even budget systems to grow exponentially faster than software demands for that power. Not only is it more cores, but the power of a single core has also increased steadily. And the first Core Duo's were easily faster per core than the previous fastest single core Pentiums on top of having two cores. More power, better multi-tasking, it's a no brainer. The amount of computing power has increased much faster while software demands just haven't kept pace, and most software just doesn't require 3.5ghz and four cores for an optimal experience. The result is five, six, seven year old PC's are still perfectly serviceable. The same just generally wasn't true in the era of single core PC's.
Over the next couple of years the use of MP3 exploded: Napster, the iPod, iTunes. The boundary for "can this system decode mp3 in real time" was somewhere around the late 90s. Now of course it's not an issue on any device.
Not to mention the 32 bit to 64 bit transition that allowed us to use more RAM in Windows.
IMHO, the upgrade from HDD to SSD was the most noticeable speed jump.
The systems from 2000 that I was familiar with had 512MB of less.