ITSMILNER wrote:Has Microsoft said anything about the future of backwards compatibility for Series X? I think the last I heard the BC team were working to make sure everything that was BC on XBone would run on Series X, will they continue to work on bringing more 360/OG Xbox after this? Any plans to future improve how BC games run on the new hardware?
No real details yet other than adding HDR to games which didn't have it & "Games also benefit from the full CPU and GPU clocks of Series X" (Unlike the XB1X which was only 50%), maybe more details at the June event -
Players will see the benefits of the improved hardware of Xbox Series X for backwards compatible games, including improved boot and load times, more stable frame rates, higher resolutions and improved image quality. The Compatibility team is also continuing to create entirely new techniques and innovation that we can use to further enhance the existing catalog of games when running on Xbox Series X.
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/03/16/ ... es-x-tech/Further goodies were to come - and owners of HDR screens are going to love the second key feature I saw. We got to see the Xbox One X enhanced version of Halo 5 operating with a very convincing HDR implementation, even though 343 Industries never shipped the game with HDR support. Microsoft ATG principal software engineer Claude Marais showed us how a machine learning algorithm using Gears 5's state-of-the-art HDR implementation is able to infer a full HDR implementation from SDR content on any back-compat title. It's not fake HDR either, Marais rolled out a heatmap mode showing peak brightness for every on-screen element, clearly demonstrating that highlights were well beyond the SDR range.
"It can be applied to all games theoretically, technically, I guess we're still working through user experiences and things like that but this is a technical demo," revealed Marais. "So this [Halo 5] is four years old, right, so let's go to the extreme and jump to a game that is 19, 20 years old right now - and that is Fusion Frenzy. Back then there's nothing known about HDR, no-one knew about HDR things. Games just used 8-bit back buffers."
This was a show-stopping moment. It was indeed Fusion Frenzy - an original Xbox title - running with its usual 16x resolution multiplier via back-compat, but this time presented with highly convincing, perceptibly real HDR. The key point is that this is proposed as a system-level feature for Xbox Series X, which should apply to all compatible games that don't have their own bespoke HDR modes - and as Marais demonstrated, it extends across the entire Xbox library.
"But you can think of other things that we could do," Marias adds. "Let's look at accessibility. If you have people that cannot read well or see well, you probably want to enhance contrast when there's a lot of text on-screen. We can easily do that. We talked to someone that's colourblind this morning and that's a great example. We just switch on the LUT and we can change colours for them to more easily experience the announcement there."
It's clear that there's a lot of love for the Xbox library and that the back-compat team are hugely excited about what they do. "Hopefully you realise that we are still quite passionate about this," says Peggy Lo. "It's a very personal project for a lot of us and we are committed to keep doing this and making all your games look best on Series X."
A lot more on BC etc at the link -
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digi ... full-specs
