Exciting news coming for Xbox fans this week, as I add more and more reasons to my personal list of why the Xbox Series X is going to be dope, Microsoft has confirmed that their backwards compatibility team has spent over 500,000 hours optimising 1000’s of games from the last 4 generations of Xbox to look and play as good as they possibly can on their upcoming Next-gen consoles.
Every backwards compatible game on Xbox will be able to run natively on the Series X and the Series S, maximising the potential of the consoles beefy CPU, GPU and SSD with no boost mode or downclocking. What this means, in non-techno-babble, is that each and every backwards compatible game you play (from ANY generation of Xbox) will have better framerates, resolution and overall visual quality than they did on their launch platform, the best possible quality they can have to be precise. And of course, backwards compatible games also benefit from the custom Next-gen NVME SSD that makes up the core of the Series X velocity architecture and thereby will have much faster load times.
Another new toy these games will have to play with is the system of Auto HDR, which, as explained by Microsoft, “automatically adds HDR enhancements to games which only shipped with SDR. Auto HDR enhances the visual quality of an SDR game without changing the original artistic intent of the game.”. Again, to translate, any and all backwards compatible games will automatically have improved visuals (mainly focused in colour and brightness) that won’t completely change the look and feel of the game.
A visual demo of what Auto HDR does to a game, sorry we couldn’t apply Auto HDR to the quality of the image itself. We all have current-gen computers…
Perhaps most impressively of all, Microsoft claims that the capabilities of the Next-gen Xbox will accommodate for the framerates of some titles to effectively double, but they explicitly mentioned that this will not apply to all titles, since framerates are limited by the physics and animations of certain games. One example given however was Fallout 4, which ran at about 30fps on the Xbox One, will apparently run at 60fps on the Series S.
Along with all these improvements, Microsoft has promised there will be no delay with backwards-compatible features, simply insert a backwards-compatible disc into your Series X/S, install the game and you’re ready to go. Microsoft users who have a digital library will also be able to access their entire digital ready to install list from the moment they turn on their console. And cloud saves mean that if you didn’t get to finish a particular game before upgrading, your progress will be synced on your new console and you can pick up right where you left off.
What do you think of this news? Have you preordered your Next-Gen Xbox yet? I sure have! Let us know what you think by tagging us @gotogame.
Alec is a gentle giant who writes for Gotogame. He likes watching the sunset with a cup of tea just as much as he likes ripping and tearing through his latest replay of Doom Eternal. Tag him in your tea or tearing pics @Mistahmacho
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