As you'll be aware if you've already checked out our review of the Analogue 3D, this FPGA-based N64 reproduction has some amazing tricks up its sleeve – perhaps the most striking being its ability to give N64 software a performance boost via overclocking.
While it's possible to run the Analogue 3D in 'original hardware' mode and have games performance exactly as you remember them, three overclock options – 'Enhanced' (RAM boost), 'Enhanced+' (RAM and GPU boost), and 'Unleashed' (RAM, GPU and CPU boost) – give you the chance to draw more performance out of the system's 220k LE Altera Cyclone 10GX FPGA chip.
Speaking to our friends over at Digital Foundry, Analogue Lead Hardware Engineer Marshall Hecht explains how this system works:
"A3D has modern-day RAM that can provide a lot more bandwidth than the original Rambus interface on the N64. To ensure compatibility and timing accuracy, we introduce very specific delays to model how the original Rambus works. Basically, we slow things down. [The A3D's "Enhanced" setting] will bypass all these, letting things rip, but there's more. In the process of designing the 3D we developed efficiency improvements across how various parts of the RCP utilise the RAM, which are enabled with "Enhanced," also."
With some games, this can lead to undesirable performance or even a refusal to run correctly, but when you find a game that does benefit, the results are stunning – as you can see from the comparison video below.
Some games will actually run faster than in their original form (check out the Banjo-Tooie clip), while others run with improved frame rates, like Perfect Dark, without any timing issues.