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Xbox has just announced several new benefits for backwards compatible games on both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, including auto HDR and increased frame rates.
An announcement on the official Xbox website (opens in new tab) earlier today broke the news. “With Xbox Series X and Series S we are introducing a new feature named Auto HDR,” writes Xbox’s Compatibility Program lead Peggy Lo. “Auto HDR automatically adds HDR enhancements to games which only shipped with SDR. Auto HDR enhances the visual quality of an SDR game without changing the original artistic intent of the game.”
Lo goes on to explain that developers don’t have to do anything for auto HDR to be enabled with their older games on the new hardware. “Also, since Auto HDR is enabled by the console’s hardware, there is absolutely no performance cost to the CPU, GPU or memory,” she continues.
Both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are going to improve on frame rates for older games. Lo point to the demonstration just below, in which Fallout 4’s frame rate is effectively doubled to a smooth 60FPS. It should be noted, however, that the doubled frame rate feature is only applicable to a select number of titles.
Additionally, it’s revealed that games which originally rendered at 360p on the original Xbox, and 720p on the Xbox 360, will run at 4K on the Xbox Series X, and 1440p on the Xbox Series S.
Finally, there’s cloud saves being used with backwards compatibility, meaning you can pick up where you left off on the current console generation, and continue straight away on next-gen machines. On top of that, cloud saves will soon be free to all Xbox 360 users.
This is a really impressive move from Xbox. Committing to upscaled resolutions and increased frame rates for older titles is a treat, and coupled in with Xbox Game Pass immediately bringing plenty of older titles to next-gen hardware is a win.
If you’re still looking to reserve Microsoft’s more powerful console ahead of its launch on November 10, head over to our Xbox Series X pre-order guide for more information.
