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Xbox Details Their Backwards Compatibility Plans Including System-Level HDR and Doubling the Target Framerates/Resolution of Select Games

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Dancrane212

Dancrane212

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Oct 25, 2017
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news.xbox.com

Xbox Series X: The Most Powerful and Compatible Next-Gen Console with Thousands of Games at Launch - Xbox Wire

[Update 9/14/20: We’re happy to share that backward compatible titles will be coming to Xbox Series S as well as Xbox Series X. To deliver the highest quality backwards compatible experience consistent with the developer’s original intent, the Xbox Series S runs the Xbox One S version of...
news.xbox.com news.xbox.com

A lot of this was initially covered by Digital Foundry during the big Series X technical breakdown but it's still nice to get it reiterated:

Not only should gamers be able to play all of these games from the past, but they should play better than ever before. Backwards compatible games run natively on the Xbox Series X hardware, running with the full power of the CPU, GPU and the SSD. No boost mode, no downclocking, the full power of the Xbox Series X for each and every backward compatible game. This means that all titles run at the peak performance that they were originally designed for, many times even higher performance than the games saw on their original launch platform, resulting in higher and more steady framerates and rendering at their maximum resolution and visual quality. Backwards compatible titles also see significant reductions in in-game load times from the massive leap in performance from our custom NVME SSD which powers the Xbox Velocity Architecture. As I play through my personal backlog as part of our internal testing, all of the incredible games from Xbox One and earlier play best on Xbox Series X.
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Beginning with Xbox One X, the compatibility team developed brand new innovations that could be applied to a hand curated list of titles to enhance them even further than what was possible when they were first created. Techniques such as the Heutchy method, which enables titles to render with increased resolutions up to 4K, or applying anisotropic filtering to improve the final image quality bring these classic games up to modern standards, better than ever before.
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The team was not content to just rely on the increased hardware performance to improve your playing experience. The team developed new platform level capabilities to ensure all of your games continue to get even better. In partnership with the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, Xbox Series X delivers a new, innovative HDR reconstruction technique which enables the platform to automatically add HDR support to games. As this technique is handled by the platform itself, it allows us to enable HDR with zero impact to the game's performance and we can also apply it to Xbox 360 and original Xbox titles developed almost 20 years ago, well before the existence of HDR.
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With all of the additional power and advancements of the Xbox Series X, the compatibility team now has a veritable playground of new capabilities to innovate and push the limits of game preservation and enhancement. The compatibility team has invented brand new techniques that enable even more titles to run at higher resolutions and image quality while still respecting the artistic intent and vision of the original creators. We are also creating whole new classes of innovations including the ability to double the frame rate of a select set of titles from 30 fps to 60 fps or 60 fps to 120 fps.
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The team also continues to listen to feedback from the community on additional titles you would like to see added to the compatibility program. Resurrecting titles from history often presents a complex mix of technical and licensing challenges, but the team is committed to doing everything we can to continue to preserve our collective gaming legacy.
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Naga said:
Also:
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Dreazy

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Oct 25, 2018
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Xbox BC team are fucking magicians, made my purchase of One X worth it alone to play all those xbox an some 360 games in 4k
 
Naga

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I was going to share that, nice to see a thread was made. Super promising, and they've shown on X1 they really know what they're doing.
Looking forward to their next game additions!

Also:


Nice PR lol.
 

Deleted member 7051

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Like damn. That is one very comprehensive backwards compatibility feature. Depending on the PS5 backwards compatibility I might actually double dip on multiplatform games for the 360 and One just so I can play them on the X.
 
ReplacementPelican

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Oct 29, 2017
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Fantastic messaging, eager for Sony's response as this is probably the main area that Microsoft are excelling at that Sony don't have much of a response for.

I'm not getting a Series X at launch but own a lot of games on my One X so glad to know there will be updates waiting for me when I do upgrade.
 

Justice_DP

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Jan 28, 2020
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I'm really interested in how the HDR implementation will work and how they may account for problems in individual games. Their solution to the problems with the oneX were great. Hopefully the next gen feature set for BC will see the same care.
 
Valcrist

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LewieP said:
Brilliant news. I hope Sony can at least try to match this.
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They won't come even close. Sony has been largely disappointing in supporting their back catalogue, while their strength is in their first party games and Japanese exclusives. I'm sticking to owning both, I guess. MS deserves support for supporting their old games to this level. \o/
 
JaseC64

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Jesus this is sooooo goooood.

Mah gah putting Sony to shame once again on messaging. Fuck them likes. This is what I want and need. Direct to the point and beast of a BC mode.

This sounds amazing. I don't even know what else to say. Bravo.
 
LewieP

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DarknessTear said:
They won't come even close. Sony has been largely disappointing in supporting their back catalogue, while their strength is in their first party games and Japanese exclusives. I'm sticking to owning both, I guess. MS deserves support for supporting their old games to this level. \o/
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I don't think Sony will be able to beat or even match Microsoft for PS4/Xbox One games. Only ace up their sleeve would be to offer PS1/2/3 BC in my view.
 
Damn Silly

Damn Silly

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Oct 25, 2017
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Those damn wizards.

The double framerate sounds particularly nice, though I assume it's select titles because doing that across the board would completely fuck up a fair few titles.
 

Bradbatross

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Mar 17, 2018
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This is so awesome. Some of these older games are going to feel like brand new games on the Series X.
 
CloseTalker

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Such incredible news. The only thing that would make this better is them announcing they'll be making more 360 and OG Xbox games back compat in the future
 

Deleted member 15447

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Serious question, could this cause problems for some older games?

Is there such a thing as a game running too fast? My only experience with this was old dos games.

Sounds better and better with each bit of news. As a gamer, I can't not have both consoles again.
 

Deleted member 135

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Is it really a true statement to say "no boost mode" when every game is being forced to run in a boosted state?
 
Keyouta

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Amazing news, I only wish their competitors could have half that feature set. Glad Microsoft and the Xbox backcompat team have been hard at work for so long, helps both the library and game preservation in general.
 

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Naga said:
I was going to share that, nice to see a thread was made. Super promising, and they've shown on X1 they really know what they're doing.
Looking forward to their next game additions!

Also:


Nice PR lol.
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But it's true. They have been working on BC from last generation. I mean Sony wouldn't put that much effort into BC if not for Microsoft after last-gen which is the beauty of competition.
 
Clive

Clive

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After the whole PS1/PS2 debacle on PS4 I decided to buy my multiplats on Xbox and I have not regretted it. Awesome to see their continued dedication and I look forward to playing four generations of Xbox on one console.
 
HDR system explanation from EvilBoris
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    Dancrane212

    Dancrane212

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    Zhao_Yun said:
    Will this be "true" HDR though if the game was only SDR originally?
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    It's apparently a very convincing implementation:
    EvilBoris said:
    I've been speaking to them about it. It's super sophisticated and extends the work done by the Coalition on Gears 5.

    With Gears they trained an AI to look at SDR and HDR output frames of various games and understand what the difference in colour space transform was:

    So HDR became the ground truth and SDR was the image that was derived from that.
    The AI could see how HDR to SDR had and once it had been trained with enough data would actually be able to do the opposite. To take the SDR image and make it look like the same HDR image.

    Trained with enough data you can then take an SDR game and perform that same inverse tone mapping.
    They are working with an even more sophisticated setup than the software only approach of Gears 5.
    Now the advantage with doing it at a source level, is that it is possible to have access to the original 11bit or 16bit data including, rather than have to apply it as a post-process to an 8bit image - which doesn't contain enough data to avoid banding.
    Also because of it is happening at source, it is far faster and latency-free compared to doing it in other ways (or having a TV do it)

    The Solution for the Xbox Series X goes further and all of this happens on the display controller so there is 0 affect on memory and GPU performance , working in HDR normally has a minor hit on these things. Which is actually why the S is overlocked vs the XB1 OG.
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