# Claude Code in Unity: We Benchmarked It on a Game

> Source: <https://ziva.sh/blogs/claude-code-unity-benchmark>
> Published: 2026-08-04 00:00:00+00:00

# Claude Code in Unity: We Benchmarked It on a Game

Ziva runs docked in the Unity editor now, in beta, so we reran
[our Godot benchmark](/blogs/gpt-5-6-benchmark-godot) there: build a playable Flappy Bird as
an agent, three prompts, 20-minute cap each. Claude ran on a **Pro/Max subscription**.

| Model | Tool calls | Wall time | Build cost | Rubric | Stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek v4 Flash (free) | 158 | 45.6 min (2 capped) | $0.61 | 9/10 | 3/5 |
| DeepSeek v4 Pro | 413 | 42.9 min (1 capped) | $11.96* | 9/10 | 3/5 |
Claude Sonnet 5 (BYO) | 384 | 28.2 min | $7.34* | 5/10 | 2/5 |
Claude Opus 5 (BYO) | 213 | 33.6 min | $14.73* | 10/10 | 4/5 |

* List-price equivalents, not billed: Claude ran on a subscription and this account has a 100%-off promotion on Pro. Flash’s 61 cents is real spend.

**Sonnet 5** wrote the cleanest code and a game you cannot play. The scripts are correct;
the scene is not. The camera sees y −5 to +5; Sonnet put the Ground at **y = −250**, so the
bird dies before the first pipe arrives.

**Opus 5** shipped a working game and, unprompted, a 306-line PlayMode suite — twelve tests,
run sixteen times, ending at thirteen passing. One failure (“an in-flight keypress must not
skip the overlay”) is why it added a restart delay.

**DeepSeek v4 Flash**, the free model, shipped a full game for 61 cents — built entirely in
code — but capped on two turns. Same prompts cost **$0.18 in Godot**.

**DeepSeek v4 Pro** matched that 9/10 in 413 calls, but made **zero cache reads** to Flash’s
10.4 million — most of the twenty-fold cost gap.

Unity went from **12 tools to 21** this release, adding `run_tests`

, `find_gameobjects`

and
`manage_asset`

. Two of four models used `run_tests`

unasked.

Caveats: n=1 per model, one task type, wall times not comparable across engines. One
Unity-beta defect cost three runs — a changed-API edit raises a modal dialog that blocks the
editor, and `-accept-apiupdate`

doesn’t stop it. The beta is in
[Ziva](/blogs/best-ai-tools-for-godot-2026).