I got into a debate with someone recently over the Super Nes and Genesis.  I didn't kill him for being wrong but he still seems to think that the Genesis was more capable than the Super Nes.  I now turn earth's greatest resource:  The power of the VGChartz community.  Let's end this once and for all.  Genesis vs Snes for the fate of the universe.

Begin.

Super Nes was more powerful overall (ram, video and resolution output) but I believe that the Genesis CPU was faster, despite it being launched 2 years prior.

While Genesis CPU was clocked far higher than SNES CPU, the latter exceeded the former in every other possible way by a factor of 2x at least

The SNES came 2 years after Genesis and was more powerfull. It had a higher resolution, more colors, better sprite capabilities, more memory (2X RAM, 8X Audio memory) and way better sound (Doom SNES sounds better than Doom 32X). Genesis had a faster CPU, but that was all. Here are the specs.

Basically, Genesis could do games with things going crazy fast like Sonic better than SNES because of the big CPU difference. But in general visuals, SNES was considerably superior.

About people thinking its the opposite, it was because of Sega's way superior marketing. Nintendo had better specs, but the public, specially kids, would brag about numbers like RAM, sprite count, resolution, without even knowing what they were talking about. Then someone at Sega USA looked at the spec sheet and saw that they lost in everything, except the CPU. So they created the Blast Processing marketing effort to make it look like it was a different and advanced tech, instead of only more MHz. As you can see, it worked pretty well.

SNES overall but Mega Drive did have some powerful features... SNES had a chip inside the game cart that simulates 3D effects making games like Star Fox and Donkey Kong a gen ahead.

Everyone appears to have the right answer on this one. In your face, Genesis supporters! Also, Phil Collins sucked. Yeah. I said it.

All I have read about the power of the past consoles is that one was superior in sound and the other in graphics. But I can't remember which did what, probably SEGA had better sound.
But I could be mixing that up with NES/MS.

Donkey Kong Country didn't have any special chips, if I remember correctly.  Yoshi's Island, Starfox, Stunt Race FX and a few others did but Nintendo was pretty proud of having DKC run with just the power of the console.  Now, if you're talking about NES games like Castlevania 3 and Super Mario 3, then yeah.  Donkey Kong on the SNES?  Nah.

I don't know because first Genesis was all like BLAST PROCESSING but then SNES was all like now you're playing with power SUPER POWER so I don't know!

I forgot that... Doom SNES used the SuperFX (the same on Star Fox) It was a much smarter decision than Sega's approach with console addons like Sega CD and 32X (despite the addons achieving better results like Virtua Fighter 32X and specially the superb Knuckles Kaotix on 32X).