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Running older video games on newer consoles might seem like a simple idea – newer boxes are faster, so older, weaker games should just work, right? Things never quite work that way, especially when the architecture changes dramatically between generations of consoles, which is why we were fascinated by Team Xbox’s emphasis on “backward compatibility.”
Microsoft’s engineering team has already powered hundreds of the latest generation games on the Xbox One family (and beyond). Now engineers have innovated on a completely different take on backward compatibility: making games of the past, especially the base Xbox One wimpy, made smoother on the X / S series. This new feature, dubbed “FPS Boost” , is particularly interesting because it does not require any code update injected into the old games.
No remasters; more like ReShades
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s announcement of this feature on Wednesday fails to explain exactly how it works. Instead, he leaves the storytelling tasks to Digital Foundry’s executive analysts, who got exclusive insight into the story. In a Wednesday video describing how the feature works, John Linneman confirms that Xbox series consoles, while processing code from older games, can “return data from Direct3D [a longstanding API used in both Xbox consoles and Windows games] to play faster than the original [consoles] did.”
As a result, all internal game logic continues to render to its original target frame rate, but crucial elements for 3D frame rate performance, from animations to camera movement, may get an increase. of frame rate without breaking the underlying game. Linneman reports that this happens with no game code changes or INI tweaks. During the broadcast, Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter steps in to compare this to the PC gaming ecosystem of mods, especially popular post-processing injector mods like ReShade that fans often apply to PC versions left unattended. by their creators (cough, cough, NieR: Automata).
The Digital Foundry video joins us at Ars Technica in raising a serious eyebrow on rolling out this feature: in the form of five relatively low-key games, all from the Xbox One generation. The improvements listed below apply to both X Series and S Series Consoles.
- UFC 4 (going from 30fps to 60fps)
- New Super Lucky Tale (from 60fps to 120fps)
- Far cry 4 (from 30fps to 60fps)
- Watch dogs 2 (from 30fps to 60fps)
- Sniper 4 (from 30fps to 60fps)
Three of the games listed never received an Xbox One X compatibility patch, and FPS Boost does do not affect the resolution. So games like Watch dogs 2 and Far cry 4 keep running at Xbox One base resolutions while increasing the frame rate. Still, the results are impressive in terms of a set-it-and-forget-it patch to improve the smoothness of older games (and keep those enhanced frame rates locked in and stable) without breaking anything.
(UFC 4 is a bit more confusing in terms of boosts, so I’ll clarify quickly: Its existing version offered a lower-res 60fps mode on Xbox One X and was locked at 30fps on the Xbox One base. Now both X / S series can access 60 fps modes, while the X series can achieve up to 1800p resolution at this frame rate.)
Also, none of the above games are officially released by Microsoft, which may be a power play to convince fans that these fixes may soon appear for all older game, long left unpatched by the original publishers – although Linneman confirms that Microsoft has to do game-by-game testing in terms of the issues introduced by this injection process. Still, if the $ 299 S-Series is about to get such improvements at lower render resolutions, a larger FPS Boost ecosystem will make its value proposition all the greater for anyone less interested in pixels. and more interested in performance per dollar.
These updates are expected to roll out to Xbox series consoles today, while new sets of per-game visual toggles will roll out “this spring,” according to Microsoft. This menu will include FPS Boost, Auto-HDR and, according to Linneman, perhaps other options like anisotropic filtering.
As Linneman and Leadbetter point out, Microsoft had previously announced plans to update frame rates for existing software, especially Fallout 4 (a game to which Microsoft now technically holds the publishing rights, thanks to the acquisition of Zenimax / Bethesda). But FO4 doesn’t appear in today’s presentation, and it’s unclear whether its frame rate plans require a complete code rewrite or whether Microsoft is going to take advantage of this FPS Boost trick. It’s unclear exactly how many more games might see upgrades, beyond the promise to “reveal more FPS Boost games soon,” and we haven’t heard any commitments yet regarding FPS Boost coming to the games. Xbox 360 or OG Xbox.
But it’s hard to imagine Microsoft building system-level teases on such upgrades and then only improving, say, a dozen older games. So we look forward to more frame rate updates to come.
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