Retroarch 1.6.7
I tried with several different SNES 9x cores, including 2010, 2005, and Next.

Also, why I'm using 1.6.7 instead of any newer versions released here, every version newer than this release gives me crashes. 1.7 crashes randomly, and 1.8 crashes within about a minute or two. 1.6.7 is stable, though.

I'm not talking about any games that use SuperFX chips, since obviously there's no way in hell those will run fine on a Steam Link. I'm talking Super Mario World, Gradius III, F-Zero, and Actraiser. As far as I'm aware, none of these games use any demanding enhancement chips like SuperFX.

NES and Genesis games run fine, just SNES games don't.

I don't have an FPS counter enabled, but, judging by my experience on other devices (My Galaxy S6 has the same issue if I use bsnes-hd), what's happening is FPS is dipping to around 45-55, which is just enough to cause the audio to be really staticy or whatever you'd call it. This is what I'm calling unplayable, because it sounds atrocious.

So, is there any way to squeeze a few more frames per second out of the steam link? Or is it really too weak to handle even basic SNES games?