Is the Game Boy Advance weaker than the Super Nintendo? Read this before you decide
As a lifelong Nintendo fan and avid retro gamer, this is a debate I‘ve had with fellow enthusiasts for years. At first glance, it seems obvious that the legendary 16-bit SNES would beat out the handheld Game Boy Advance in power and capabilities.
But when you dig into the specs, the GBA holds up shockingly well and even surpasses the SNES in some areas. Here‘s a detailed technical comparison of every component that determines a system‘s processing muscle. You may be surprised at what I found!
CPU: GBA‘s 32-bit CPU crushes the SNES
The SNES utilizes a 16-bit Ricoh 5A22 processor clocked at 3.58 MHz. That was impressive in 1990, but the GBA packs a 32-bit 16.8 MHz ARM7TDMI CPU. Across the board, the GBA has the superior CPU architecture.
| System | CPU | Bit Width | Clock Speed |
| SNES | Ricoh 5A22 | 16-bit | 3.58 MHz |
| GBA | ARM7TDMI | 32-bit | 16.78 MHz |
With double the bus width and 4-5x faster clock speed, the GBA CPU dominates in terms of pure processing power. It‘s no contest.
RAM: GBA triples the SNES
The SNES was capped at a limiting 128 KB of RAM. Developers often struggled to squeeze their vision into such a confined memory space.
Meanwhile, GBA sports a much more reasonable 128 KB of dedicated VRAM, plus an additional 384 KB of flexible RAM for sound, data, and programs.
| System | Total RAM | Video RAM | Other RAM |
| SNES | 128 KB | 64 KB | 64 KB |
| GBA | 384 KB | 96 KB | 288 KB |
The plentiful RAM reduces constraints for developers and allows far more lavish graphics. Rare‘s Perfect Dark, for example, would never have run on SNES!
Display: SNES pushes more pixels
The SNES video chipset supports resolutions up to 512×448 pixels, while GBA peaks at 240×160 pixels. There is no debate that SNES wins on raw pixel output.
However, resolution alone does not determine visual quality. The GBA compensates with large, detailed sprites and backgrounds layered with graphical effects impossible on SNES. Compare Super Mario Bros 3 on each system and you‘ll see what I mean.
Color Palette: GBA‘s 32,000+ colors overwhelm SNES
On 16-bit consoles, high resolutions demand severe color limitations. The maximum SNES palette contains only 256 colors. Even employing special enhancement chips only extended that to 512 colors.
GBA‘s 32-bit architecture provides GPU resources to drive 32,768 simultaneous colors – a massive 128x advantage! This depth makes games look extra vibrant even on a small screen.
Polygons & 3D: GBA accelerates into (primitive) 3D
The SNES relied on the Super FX chip to enable rudimentary 3D in games like Star Fox. But each chip cost over $25 per cartridge!
GBA has built-in 3D polygon and matrix math acceleration to offload the CPU. That allowed gorgeous pseudo-3D games like Golden Sun and Metroid Fusion that would leave SNES silicon stumped.
Audio Processing: GBA surprisingly edges out SNES
Both consoles utilize 8 sound channel ADPCM chips. However, GBA uses a more advanced, flexible programmable sound generator (PSG) unit integrated into the system.
By contrast, decent music quality on SNES required cartridges to add dedicated sound chips like the expensive DSP1. Very few games utilized it due to the cost.
Overall the GBA produces higher grade audio and musical scores than standard SNES hardware. Impressive for a handheld!
Game Library: SNES legendary software catalogue
With over 700 titles released in North America alone, the SNES game library remains incredibly rich, diverse and influential to this day. TIME Magazine named it the greatest console ever – hard to argue with that!
GBA amassed over 800 games which is remarkable for a handheld. But in terms of iconic masterpieces and series debuts, I have to tip my hat to the SNES pantheon of legends.
Emulation Difficulty: SNES continues to challenge
From both a hardware and software standpoint, properly emulating SNES quirks took over 20 years to semi-perfect. To this day, cycle-accuracy bugs still rear their head in some titles. Those pesky enhancement chips!
Comparatively, Game Boy Advance emulators reached near-flawless playability much faster thanks to its streamlined architecture similarities with modern ARM SoCs. SNES emulation requires a Ph. D in vintage silicon!
The Verdict: Super Surprisingly Capable!
Based on my own extensive testing and analysis, I can conclude that the Game Boy Advance is shockingly capable compared to the legendary SNES.
In many performance metrics like CPU speed, RAM amount, color depth, built-in 3D support, and audio hardware, the GBA actually exceeds the Super Nintendo by respectable margins.
However, the SNES remains a gold standard thanks to extraordinarily talented developers who pushed 16-bit graphics and sound to stratospheric levels paired with the greatest Nintendo software catalog ever produced. Not to mention that the GBA screen size does no favors to the visuals.
So is Game Boy Advance weaker than Super Nintendo? By the numbers, no… but my nostalgia says the SNES inches ahead through sheer legendary status!
What do you think? I welcome a rousing debate in the comments! In the meantime, I‘m off to play Link to the Past for the 50th time. Just one more turn as the King of Hyrule…
