Speedrunners Left Scratching Their Heads After New Discovery Suggests the SNES Works Faster as It Ages
The speedrunning community is trying to wrap its head around a technological phenomenon that is seemingly causing the SNES to run games faster as it ages.
Alarm bells rang in early February when Bluesky user Alan Cecil (@tas.bot) spread the word that the Nintendo’s iconic console seemed to be running games slightly faster now than when it left production lines in the 1990s. It’s a theory that would mean the nearly 50 million SNES units sold may now feature improved performance with games like Super Mario World, Super Metroid, and Star Fox instead of wearing down as the years go on.
The idea of a video game console — or any kind of technology — working more efficiently simply thanks to the passage of time sounds ludicrous, but Cecil’s findings suggest a single component may be what’s setting the SNES apart from the rest.
The Fastest Thing Alive
As explained in an interview 404 Media conducted with Cecil, official Nintendo specs say the SNES’s audio processing unit (APU) SPC700 has a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000Hz dictated by a ceramic resonator that runs at 24.576MHz. Retro console fans have documented that these details aren’t quite accurate, with recordings from the last few decades showing slightly altered DSP rates depending on the physical conditions — such as temperature — the SNES is recorded in. It means the console is often processing audio and sending it to the CPU at a different rate than Nintendo has communicated, and as the DSP fluctuates, so too does the game’s speed even if it’s in small, unrecognizable ways.
That’s all fine and good, but where things get interesting is how that number has changed in the last 34 years. Cecil asked SNES owners to record data related to their SNES units after noticing slightly higher DSP rates that were even more out of the ordinary than previously documented. The more than 140 responses gathered so far show an undeniable trend in increased DSP rates in recent measurements.
Some previously recorded average DSP numbers for the SNES’s SPC700 hovered at 32,040Hz in 2007 — Cecil’s findings raise that average to 32,076Hz. Factors such as hot and cold environments do play a part in higher and lower stats, too, but not by enough to alter DSP in the way needed to yield these results. In other words, it looks like the SNES is processing audio faster as time goes on.
“Based on 143 responses, the SNES DSP rate averages 32,076Hz, rising 8Hz from cold to warm,” Cecil explained in a follow-up Bluesky post fit with a layout of the data. “Warm DSP rates go from 31,965 to 32,182Hz, a 217Hz range. Therefore, temperature is less significant. Why? How does it affect games? We do not know. Yet.”
Any%
Cecil admits that, while fascinating, more research is needed to determine not only how much faster SNES units are processing game audio but what exactly the cause is. Data related to how consoles performed in their first decade on the market, for example, is limited. For now, at least on the surface, Nintendo’s second major home console appears to be aging quite gracefully as it nears its 35th birthday.
Regardless of what exactly might be behind these bizarre circumstances, the prospect of a popular gaming console gradually causing games to run faster has made waves in the speedrunning community. An SPC700 progressively processing audio to the CPU quicker than intended could, in theory, impact game performance by shortening load times in certain sections. Audio processing faster in 2025 than it did in an identical speedrun from 1990 could potentially send more than three decades of leaderboard rankings and records into question. Thankfully, how a wiser SNES might affect a Super Mario World speedrun isn’t so straightforward.
APU speeds aren’t a one-to-one translation to visual game speed. In reality, even the most extreme circumstances related to these new findings would likely only shave off less than one second of your average speedrun. How each game might benefit from altered audio processing is also up for debate, and there’s no indication of how significantly longer speedruns could be impacted at the time of this story’s publication. The speedrunning community’s research is in its infancy, but even as further experimentation is conducted, the consensus for now is that players have little to fear.
While Cecil continues digging into what makes the SNES tick, Nintendo’s console is charging through its 30s and feeling better than ever. For more on the SNES, you can see where the device landed on the list of best-selling consoles of all time.
Photo by Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
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