Xbox Series X and Series S Backward Compatibility Explained

Backward compatibility is one of the main pillars of Microsoft’s launch for its next-generation consoles: The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, the company says, will launch with the ability to play “thousands of Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Xbox Original games. “But there is a huge gap between the capabilities of the two models -” the most powerful Xbox of all time “and” the smallest Xbox of all time “, respectively – which means that they will handle compatibility. with previous versions differently.

Microsoft introduced the Xbox Series S last week and said it will debut alongside the bigger and stronger Series X on November 10 at a much more affordable price of $ 299 instead of $ 499. A major difference between what the Two models is the resolution: While both consoles can play games at frame rates of up to 120 frames per second, the Xbox Series X is designed to run at 4K resolution, while the S Series is geared toward 1440p.

Next-gen consoles are analogous to the current two Xbox One models, Xbox One S and Xbox One X. And Microsoft recently announced that backward compatibility will work accordingly on upcoming consoles.

How will backward compatibility work on Xbox Series S?

Since the debut of Xbox One X in late 2017, Microsoft has delivered Xbox One X enhancements for nearly 70 Xbox 360 and original Xbox games. These titles look and play better on an Xbox One X than on an Xbox One S (or Xbox One launch model) – enhancements include higher quality anti-aliasing, greater texture detail, and nine times the resolution (4K vs 720p ).

However, the Xbox Series S will not support those improvements, Microsoft recently confirmed. Instead, the company said in a statement to VGC on Friday, “The Xbox Series S runs the Xbox One S version of backward-compatible games while applying improved texture filtering, higher and more consistent frame rates, load times. faster and Auto HDR “.

It may seem disappointing that even Microsoft’s weakest next-gen console can’t offer the same backward compatibility improvements as the company’s strongest current-gen model. But the math checks out: On paper, the Xbox Series S has less raw power than the Xbox One X, with a graphics performance of 4 teraflops compared to 6 teraflops. It also has less system memory: 10GB for the Xbox Series S (of which 8GB at most is available to developers) vs. 12GB for the Xbox One X (of which 9GB is available to developers ).

With that in mind, it’s not a bad consolation prize that the Xbox Series S still brings some improvements to running older games. When asked for more details, a Microsoft representative told Polygon that the aforementioned benefits are “enhancements that are not possible on Xbox One X”. The spokesperson also noted that the Xbox Series S will continue to be able to run some Xbox One games at “double the frame rate,” such as Gears 5, which will support 120 fps multiplayer action on the two next-generation Xbox models, thanks to “more than double the effective performance of the Xbox One S CPU and GPU.”

How will backward compatibility work on Xbox Series X?

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft announced in May that backward-compatible games will harness “the full power of the Xbox Series X” for a variety of performance and image quality improvements. In addition to the same doubled frame rate that the S Series will support (again, for certain games), the X Series will be able to “automatically add HDR support to games,” said Jason Ronald, Xbox’s director of program management. And of course, X Series users are guaranteed to get games “rendered at their highest resolution and visual quality.”

Both of them The S Series and X Series will offer shorter load times, thanks to their fast SSDs: 512GB for the S Series and 1TB for the X Series. And both will support a new feature called Quick Resume, which will allow users to switch between various active games and, well, quickly picking up the game from where they left off.

Pre-orders for Xbox Series S and Series X will launch on September 22.