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Banned
This is how Xbox Series S backwards compatibility really works
UPDATE: For the authoritative take on Microsoft's new flagship console, Digital Foundry's full Xbox Series X review is …
www.eurogamer.net
the highlights:
OG Xbox games get a 3x resolution boost on both axis vs the 2x on each axis on One S (so a 9x boost overall vs. a 4x boost on One S). 480p games can reach 1440p this way.
Xbox 360 games with enhanced patches will get a 2x boost on each axis (4x boost overall vs. no boost on One S) so a 720p game will then be 1440p
and then the already talked about doubling of framerates for select titles:
We designed the Series S to enhance the Xbox One S games in a way that the Xbox One X can't do," system architect Andrew Goossen tells us. "We made it easy for existing Xbox One S games to be updated to run with double the frame-rate when played on Series S as well. When games are updated, existing games can query to determine whether they're running on the new console. And in terms of the performance, the Series S provides well over double the effective CPU and GPU performance over the Xbox One, making it pretty straightforward for the games to do this. And in fact, the Series S GPU runs the Xbox One S games with better performance than the Xbox One X."
The way Xbox One X handled non-enhanced Xbox One S titles was interesting - effectively users saw the enhanced GPU only running at half-rate, its compute units split between vertex and pixel processing. The new consoles are designed to run legacy Xbox One titles with the full power of both CPU and the new RDNA 2 GPUs.
"There's no real perf tuning necessary when you do this, and so often it's just as easy as changing three lines of code, and then the game works." Goossen adds. "Even when it's not that easy, the fixes are still pretty minor. We had one triple-A title where doubling the frame-rate really worked perfectly, except that the crowd animation was twice as fast as normal. And so, those sorts of fixes are typically very, very easy for developers to go fix. We're working with game developers and publishers to update [their titles]. It'll basically be select games that run at a doubled frame-rate on the Series S."
Some games will be able to see this functionality enabled by the developer themselves, while others may be collaborations between the game maker and Microsoft's compatibility team.
"In some cases, for more service-based games or games that are still have active communities, it'll actually be easier for the developer to do it," says Xbox director of program management, Jason Ronald. "And then in other cases, we may be able to do things at our level, on behalf of the title, similar to how we've done it in the past. These are all things that we're actively working through as we get closer to launch and we'll have more to share about specific enhancements in specific titles closer to launch."
a technical difference when it comes to back compat this time is that the Series S|X will use the full power of the hardware for these titles.
the Xbox One X only used half of its 6TF gpu for back compat titles, the Series S|X will throw their full 4 and 12 TF GPU respectively at these games with no holding back.
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