Even though the Xbox One, and its successor, the Xbox Series S and X, are not exactly winning the battle for gamer’s wallets, they are winning a lot of hearts with their attempt to make available hundreds of legacy titles. This includes games first released on the original Xbox console. This focus only intensified with the recent release of the Xbox Series S/X, as Microsoft wants to make sure that older titles are playable on newer and more powerful hardware.
What Is Microsoft Doing With Backward Compatible Games?
Normally, with backward compatible games, it’s up to the game’s development studio to put in the work and release performance-increasing updates. Often, this comes in the form of unlocking frame rates, although in rarer cases, some developers go as far as to rebuild parts of the game from the ground up, in order to make it look and perform better. But, in this case, Microsoft has their own team working hard to create programs that help games scale and color dynamically. With that said, in their attempt to make older games look and play better on newer hardware, Microsoft has found a new way to take advantage of the improved hardware on the Xbox Series S/X. In a recent post on Xbox Wire, Microsoft introduced the FPS Boost feature. What the feature basically does is that it improves the framerates on a number of backward compatible titles. This can be as little as doubling the original frame rate, though to quadrupling it. Either way, FPS Boost will result in a marked improvement in the performance of older titles when they are played on the Xbox Series S/X. Unfortunately, because this feature is still in its early stages, there aren’t too many titles that support it just yet. Among the few games that support FPS Boost are Far Cry 4, UFC 4, and Watch Dogs 2, as well as New Super Lucky’s Tale and Sniper Elite 4. The good news is that Microsoft is working on making FPS Boost compatible with more titles in the future.
