I think Citra already has something like this. Several games that had major framerate drops on the original 3DS run immensely better on the official Citra (using the Canary build).Anyone knows if they plan to implement internal overclock on the emulator?
I would imagine overclocking the internal CPU and GPU of the 3ds would lead to better performance on the games that have an unlocked framerate and i would consider it a great boon to have.
Rayman 3D (a port of the Dreamcast version of Rayman 2) has severe framerate problems on original 3DS hardware. It actually has a 60fps cap, but it rarely reaches it and generally hovers in the 20-40fps range (can even occasionally drop below that). But on Citra, Rayman 3D maintains a constant 60fps.
Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon is another i'll bring up. Though it's more difficult to test and compare because the game is basically broken in Citra right now. It has garbled sound and freezes in the first level, so it's basically "unplayable". It also runs around half speed for me at anything above 2x native resolution (my pc isn't weak either, i5 4670k @4ghz and a GTX 1060). Even native res can drop to 87% full speed in some of the more open complex areas. So there are still a lot of unresolved issues, they're known by the developers and hopefully will be fixed in time.
Most people probably wouldn't know this given its general performance on the original system, but Dark Moon also has a 60fps cap. Only the smallest and most basic areas (rarely found) run at that. The vast majority of the game never breaks 30fps and frequently drops to 20fps and below in the larger and more complex rooms or during combat. Despite the emulation bugs, Citra is clearly attempting to run the game at a far higher framerate than the original system. Areas which were 20-30fps on original 3DS hardware are now actually 55-60fps.
Kingdom Hearts 3D and MGS3 Snake Eater had much lower framerate caps, but also have severe framerate dips in stressful parts that I believe Citra fixes. KH3D is capped at 30fps but frequently drops to 20 and below during intense combat. The 3DS port of Snake Eater is even worse with a 20fps cap, and it too drops far below even that on a fairly frequent basis, even single digits sometimes.
Unless someone creates a hack and/or cheat code to unlock the framerate (which is entirely possible and has happened for quite a handful of games on other systems like N64, PS2, GC, PSP, DS and even Wii U), Citra can't make them run better than their cap allows. But with KH3D and Snake Eater, i'm betting their drops below the caps are also fixed. I've done some preliminary tests with Kingdom Hearts 3D. Haven't tested beyond the first world yet (the worst fps drops are in the other worlds), but fought some battles and it has yet to dip below its 30fps cap. On a real 3DS, I would already have bumped into framerate problems by now.