Yep, most of the trickery can.

I think generally that SNES games hold up better. The increase in colors, the hardware scaling, and the sample-based, as opposed to chip-tune based, sound is also nicer. That being said, there are some fantastic Genesis exclusives and the SNES had a hard time with certain genres with a lot of stuff going, so for shmups in particular, the Genesis was the superior format.

I was always disappointed with the horrendous slowdown in Gradius on the Snes and the flickering and slowdown in Super R-Type. That Final Fight was single player only was also a blow.

In their heyday, I played many more games on the Genesis as it had better sports games, arcade conversions, and shmups.

Considering it was released two whole years later it is no surprise that it is better, but as some of you have mentioned, it should have been much more powerful.

I still have a double-switched MegaDrive (regions and 50/60hz) and a Japanese Super Famicom (with adapters for Famicom games, US SNES games, MegaDrive/Genesis games (!?!), and GameBoy games - now if someone would please release a PC Engine adapter!).

The Genesis also had a special processor on a cartridge included in Virtua Racing, which runs very well (I would say it runs better than the Super FX 3D games). Special chips in cartridges was also nothing new as several Famicom games had various chips. This resulted in several NES games having terrible music compared with their Japanese counterparts with the special music chip, for example.

No, only those early games had any issues with slow down and flickering... That was never an issue after the early days. The snes was simply a more exotic hardware, and developers had a harder time coming to grips with it. The genesis was a duped up master system, and the snes was a system with simple 3d type capabilities and a dedicated sound chip. It was a bigger jump than most are giving it credit for.

Burning Typhoon said: fallen said: Definitely SNES imo. Basically they were "equal" imo, but the SNES had two great advantages, 256 colors onscreen vs only 64 for the Genesis. This allowed 2D art to really shine on the SNES and still look great today. I can instantly tell the difference between a Genesis and SNES game just by the muted, somber, color pallet on the Genesis version. An example, Streetfighter on both platforms: Here is what it would look like on Genny, a dark tone on everything Here is the arcade version which is similar to the SNES, bright and colorful Second thing was the SNES's superior sound chip. This really shined too. Funny because I lived through that era, and prior to release the magazines (wasn't really internet then) talked up SNES "amazing" "Mode 7" scaling and rotation as it's big advantages over the Genesis. In practice though, it ended up not mattering much compared to the colors and sounds issues. In that vein though I see SNES as a typical poor hardware effort from Nintendo that's seen as good. While I think the SNES is better hardware than the Genesis, I think given how much later it released, it should have been better, closer to an affordable Neo-Geo in power, instead of almost on par with Genesis. Also the SNES shined towards the end of it's life, notably with a technical showpieces like Donky Kong Country, which was sometimes compared graphically to early Playstation 1 releases! Granted, Nintendo had a habit of including add on helper chips directly in cartridges, and may have done so for DKC I dont recall. Still. I own both Street Fighter II: champion Edition and Super Street Fighter II on genesis.  champion Edition looks like crap.  it wasn't even fair to use that as an example because SSFII has those same stages and chracters, with far better looking sprites and sound.  we already know SNES is better, but geneis wasn't THAT terrible.  I don't even touch SFII after getting SSFII on genesis.  But, the arcade version blows both out of the water.   battletoads and double dragon the ultimate team is a more fair example in my opinion, but then again, the gap may be worse with that one.  Why not pick a game that pushed both consoles?  if there's a multiplat that did that?  I guess SUPER street fighter II did,  but surely NOT the one you listed.

Well you are comparing two different games there, not really fair. I dont really know all the details of whether SSF2 Genny has "far better sprites and sound" but I rather doubt it. I was more making a general point how the Genesis's lack of color pallette was a major weakness, you can go look up any Genesis screens and note the same trademark "subdued" look, that was my point. Anyways it came out earlier, so it has an excuse.

This is well documented. The SNES was better in every measurable way except raw processing power, and was overall the better system. The Genesis had "better" marketing, because it used bullshit words like "blast processing" and cheap digs at the competition like "Genesis does what NintenDON'T" and crap like that. As low as it was, the marketing worked really, really well, and while in the end the SNES won in sales and profit, the Genesis was still a success and to this day is remembered fondly by many, sometimes even thought of as better by those that bought into the marketing.

Less colors, worse sound, but Genesis was faster.  There were games on the SNES that had slowdown in comparison to similar games or multiconsole titles on Genesis that didn't have slowdown.

SNES compared to Genesis is like PS4 at 1080p compared to Xbox One at 720p.

Genesis compared to SNES is like PS4 at 60fps compared to Xbox One at 30fps.

SNES

With that said though the lion king game plays much better on the megadrive as it has more on screen

Slow down only on the early games, and then it wasn't a problem.... So no. It's like the ps3 in the beginning, multiplat a looked worse and performed worse than x360 games. Does that mean the x360 was faster? No. The snes was more powerful and just as "fast" as the genesis. Early games be damned. Look at smash tv, or contra 3, both were action packed, tons going on, zero slowdown. The speed argument is really a joke, and an old one at that.

You can't use "MHz" as a denominator to guage the performance of a processor of different architectures.

For example... A Pentium D Dual-Core @ 3.8ghz is going to be slower than the Celeron G1620 @ 2.7ghz.
Or a Core i5 4440 @ 3.1ghz is faster than the AMD FX 4300 @ 3.8ghz.

I'm not aware of any benchmarks or low-level break-downs of the two chips, but don't assume 2x the performance, it might be less it might be more, the Motorola chip was a pretty well engineered piece of kit.

The SNES main advantage was with Co-Processors, the CPU wasn't important really in the grand scheme of things, the CPU mostly just flogged data off to the GPU and Sound processors, then used it's modular capability to add additional processors via the game cartidges.
Hence the reason why Nintendo has it's own DSP chip stack for Mode 7, Super FX as well as Capcom's C4 chip heck one cartridge integrates an entire Gameboy motherboard and then combines the processing power of both the SNES console and the Gameboy.

That's what, ultimatly gave the SNES it's edge, the modular approach, amongst other things.

They actually put a fox in a space suit.