Microsoft Xbox Series X brings new life to Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One titles with their planned backwards compatibility.
Microsoft has always kept the promise of supporting legacy titles into their latest consoles, and for their upcoming Xbox Series X, that promise just got better. They recently revealed their plans for the next gen’s backwards compatibility, which includes titles for the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, and the Xbox One.
Jason Ronald, Partner Director of Program Management for the Xbox Platform Team at Microsoft, says that “Backwards compatible games run natively on the Xbox Series X hardware, running with the full power of the CPU, GPU, and the SSD.”
Besides, it will not only play legacy titles but also enable backwards compatible games to run at a higher and steadier frame rate while rendering at their maximum resolution. The new NVME SSD storage will also reduce in-game loading times for these older titles.
HDR support-enabled for older titles
It will also automatically add HDR support to legacy titles. Microsoft has built a new HDR reconstruction technique that allows the Series X to enable HDR support for Xbox 360 and even original Xbox games which were released nearly 20 years back, where HDR was not also a thing yet.
This innovative HDR reconstruction technology allows it to handle all the rendering processes at the platform level. This means the developers do not have to do anything to achieve this on the legacy titles. This new tech promises to do all the hard work without affecting any of the original game’s performance. If anything, it even has the capabilities to increase the frame rates.
Frame rate increase on classic games
The innovations do not end at reconstructing games and rendering them to run at 4k. Ronald stated that the Xbox Series X’s new tech could improve backward-compatible titles by increasing their frame rates significantly. 30 FPS games will run at 60 FPS, and 60 FPS will run at 120 FPS.
On top of that, users can switch between titles without losing any progress using the Xbox Series X’s new Quick Resume feature, and this is also enabled for backwards compatible games.
With this latest announcement of backwards compatibility for the Xbox Series X, Microsoft promises that upon release of the next-gen console this holiday 2020, thousands of games will already be playable.
Image used courtesy of Xbox/YouTube Screenshot