It doesn't surprise me to hear it was written in asm.
(note that this is from the second table where i check compilers that can generate code running on Pentium 1 Win9x - the first table was with whatever compiler i had installed on my PC at the time)
Perhaps i'll try benchmarking it again some day, including running on actual older hardware.
Just to clarify, my main point was the speed at which it would compile the code, which was an order of magnitude faster than anything else.
In practice it'd be fast enough anyway. Sadly i do not have anything fancy made with Delphi 2 specifically, but in this video[0] i play a software rendering 3D game i made for an MSDOS game jam last year (it also works on Windows 95[1]) which was made in Free Pascal that from the table i linked at produces executables with around the same performance as Delphi 2 (at least for the 32bit version without using any modern CPU instructions). The majority of the time is spent in the rasterizer, the innermost bits of which are written in assembly, so even if Delphi 2 was much worse at codegen it wouldn't matter much anyway.
(sometimes i do consider out of curiosity to convert the code to be compatible with Delphi 2, but it relies on language features like generics for the collections and on some FPC-specific bits for object de/serialization that would make the conversion non-trivial)