Pattern recognition algorithms have been widely used to map surface electromyographic signals to target movements as a source for prosthetic control. Recent literature has underscored differences between offline classification accuracy, the most common performance metric, and the usability of upper limb prostheses. Since the majority of investigations on pattern recognition algorithms have been conducted offline by performing the analysis on pre-recorded datasets, less knowledge has been gained with respect to real-time performance (i.e., classification when new data becomes available with limits on latency under 200-300 milliseconds).Therefore, a comparative offline and real-time performance analysis between common algorithms had yet to be performed. In this study, we investigated the offline and real-time performance of nine different classification algorithms decoding ten individual hand and wrist movements. Surface myoelectric signals were recorded from the dominant forearm of fifteen able-bodied subjects while performing the ten movements. The offline decoding demonstrated that Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) significantly (p<0.05) outperformed other classifiers with an average classification accuracy of above 97%. The real-time investigation revealed that in addition to the LDA and MLE, multilayer perceptron also outperformed the other algorithms in classification accuracy (above 68%) and completion rate (above 69%).