Making older video games work on newer consoles may seem like a simple idea: the new boxes are faster, so older, weaker games should just work, right? Things never quite work out that way, especially when architecture changes dramatically between console generations, which is why we’re fascinated by Team Xbox’s focus on ‘backward compatibility’.
Microsoft’s engineering team has been getting hundreds of games from the past to work on the Xbox One family (and beyond). Now, the engineers have grounded in a completely different vision for backward compatibility: making games from the past, especially the smart base Xbox One, become smoother on Series X / S. This new feature, called ‘FPS Boost’, is particularly interesting because it does not require any code updates that are injected into older games.
Not remasters; more like ReShades
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s announcement about the feature on Wednesday does not explain exactly how it works. Instead, it leaves the storytelling duties to the digital analysts at Digital Foundry, who received exclusive points for the story. In a video of Wednesday sharing the feature, John Linneman confirms that consoles of the Xbox series, while processing older games’ code, can return data from Direct3D [a longstanding API used in both Xbox consoles and Windows games] to make the game faster than the original [consoles] done.”
As a result, all internal game logic remains at its original target frame rate, but the important things for 3D frame rate performance, from animations to camera movement, can boost the rate without breaking the underlying game. Linneman reports that this does not happen with game code changes or INI adjustments. During the broadcast, Richard Leadbetter of Digital Foundry makes a sound to compare it to the PC game ecosystem of mods, especially popular post-processing injection modes like ReShade, which fans regularly apply to PC versions left unattended by their creators (cough, cough, NieR: automatically).
The Digital Foundry video joins us at Ars Technica to raise a serious eyebrow at how this feature is evolving: in the form of five relatively low-profile games, all from the Xbox One generation. The boosts below apply to both Series X and Series S consoles.
- UFC 4 (increase from 30 fps to 60 fps)
- New Super Lucky’s Languages (from 60 fps to 120 fps)
- Far Cry 4 (from 30 fps to 60 fps)
- Watch Dogs 2 (from 30 fps to 60 fps)
- Sniper Elite 4 (from 30 fps to 60 fps)
Three of the games listed never got an Xbox One X compatibility pattern, and FPS Boost does not not resolution affected. So, games like Watch Dogs 2 and Far Cry 4 continue to base Xbox One resolutions while increasing the frame rate. Still, the results are impressive in terms of a patch-and-forget-it patch to increase the fluidity for older games (and to hold and hold the increased frame rates) without breaking anything.
(UFC 4 is a bit more confusing in terms of its enhancement, so I’ll quickly make clear: the existing version offers a lower resolution of 60 fps on Xbox One X and is closed at 30 fps on the base Xbox One. Now both Series X / S have access to 60 fps modes, while Series X can get up to 1800p resolution at the frame rate.)
None of the above games are formally published by Microsoft, which can be a powerful game to impress fans that these spots may soon appear for any older games, which have long been unloaded by original publishers – though Linneman confirms that Microsoft should do a game-by-game test in terms of bugs introduced by this injection process. If the $ 299 Series S is willing to take advantage of such improvements at lower version resolutions, a larger FPS Boost ecosystem will make the value of the price so much greater for anyone who is no longer interested in pixels and more interested in pure performance per dollar.
These updates will consolidate on Xbox consoles today, while new visual series per game will roll out ‘this spring’, according to Microsoft. This menu contains FPS Boost, Auto-HDR, and according to Linneman, maybe other options like anisotropic filter.
As Linneman and Leadbetter pointed out, Microsoft has already teased plans to update framework rates for existing software in particular. Outcome 4 (a game for which Microsoft currently has technical publishing rights, thanks to the acquisition of Zenimax / Bethesda). But FO4 does not appear in today’s presentation, and it’s unclear whether its framework rate plans will require a complete rewrite of the code and whether Microsoft will use these clever FPS Boost tricks. Exactly how many more game upgrades may see remains unclear, other than the promise to ‘release more FPS Boost games soon’, and we have yet to hear any promises about FPS Boost possibly coming to Xbox 360 or OG Xbox games .
But it’s hard to imagine Microsoft building up a tease of the system at such a level and then just upgrading a dozen older games. We are therefore looking forward to more frame rate updates.