Xbox Series X Will Play Backwards-Compatible Games Better Than Original Systems, Microsoft Says

Microsoft has been making lofty claims about the Xbox Series X’s backwards compatibility, including that it will work with not only the entire Xbox One library, but also a bunch of titles from the Xbox 360 and original Xbox. Backwards compatibility on Xbox Series X was further clarified this morning by Jason Ronald, partner director of program management, who discussed how backwards compatibility was engineered for the new machine’s specs.

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Ronald says that “[n]ot only should gamers be able to play all of these games from the past, but they should play better than ever.” The games, he said, will be able to run natively on the Xbox Series X with the “full power” of the CPU, GPU and SSD, without boost mode or down clocking.

According to Ronald, this meant working on the custom AMD processor as well as the Xbox OS and hypervisor to work with games that were optimized for older systems with different hardware.

It doesn’t stop there: backwards-compatible games from Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One should see reductions in load times thanks to the Xbox Velocity Architecture (a combination of Microsoft’s custom NVMe SSD, DirectStorage API, Sampler Feedback Streaming and dedicated hardware decompression).

The Xbox Series X’s quick resume feature also works on older titles to start wherever they left off. Because that’s a system-level feature, it won’t take any extra work from game developers.

Microsoft’s Xbox team is also working to “double the frame rate of a select set of titles,” Ronald said. That means moving some games from 30 frames per second to 60 fps and others from 60 fps to 120 fps.

It isn’t clear which games will work yet with which specific features. "The double frame rate technique will be for a select set of titles, and implementation of it will vary by title," a Microsoft spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "We look forward to sharing more, but have nothing further at this time.”  

The spokesperson also declined to mention which games will see double frame rates, but that all titles will see "general benefits" from Velocity Architecture and more powerful components.

“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,” Ronald wrote. 

The number of games that will work is in the thousands, so we’ll see how well backwards compatibility plays out when the Xbox Series X launches this holiday season. We’ll see how it compares with Sony’s PlayStation 5, which is also launching with a unique SSD solution. 

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

  • TerryLaze
    Admin said:
    Xbox’s Jason Ronald said backwards compatible games for Xbox Series X will use the system’s full power and be able to run with reduced load times and at higher frame rates.

    Xbox Series X Will Play Backwards-Compatible Games Better Than Original Systems, Microsoft Says : Read more
    To whom it might concern,older games running better on newer hardware isn't any kind of news,you should be focusing on this.
    And the original xbox at least had a x86 CPU but the xbox360 had some PowerPC CPU.
    Unless natively only applies to the xbox one gen of games,which should be pointed out if so.

    "
    The games, he said, will be able to run natively on the Xbox Series X with the “full power” of the CPU, GPU and SSD, without boost mode or down clocking."
    Reply
  • sizzling
    Interesting but what will they do with multiplayer games? The One X had the ability to play games at higher FPS and for single player this was allowed but for multiplayer they capped the FPS to be inline with regular One consoles to deliberately stop One X players having an advantage.
    Reply
  • nofanneeded
    TerryLaze said:
    To whom it might concern,older games running better on newer hardware isn't any kind of news,you should be focusing on this.
    And the original xbox at least had a x86 CPU but the xbox360 had some PowerPC CPU.
    Unless natively only applies to the xbox one gen of games,which should be pointed out if so.

    "
    The games, he said, will be able to run natively on the Xbox Series X with the “full power” of the CPU, GPU and SSD, without boost mode or down clocking."

    They will work in a Virtual mode for sure for xbox 360 titles , and given the new Xbox power it will be working faster than the original one and with even higher resolution and better fps.

    yes even Emulators sometimes work far better than the original consoles. SNES for example Emulators give you far better options on PC than the original SNES , all what you need is very powerful CPU that can lower the Latency you get from Emulation to the point it is not noticed at all.
    Reply
  • This is to be expected from now on just as the 360 games run fantastic on the Xbox one and look better

    I still play a lot of 360 games on my Xbox one
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    The trick here is that certain games have actions and animations based on the framerate of the hardware. Because the hardware the game runs on is guaranteed to be the same, you can do things like time the acceleration of a car based on how many frames have passed. Once you take that software and speed it up, then you speed up everything based on the frame counts. This can have major impacts to the gameplay.

    That's why only certain curated games can be sped up.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    jkflipflop98 said:
    The trick here is that certain games have actions and animations based on the framerate of the hardware. Because the hardware the game runs on is guaranteed to be the same, you can do things like time the acceleration of a car based on how many frames have passed. Once you take that software and speed it up, then you speed up everything based on the frame counts. This can have major impacts to the gameplay.
    I suspect that should be less of a problem for newer Xbox One-era games though. These games were generally co-developed for release on PC, and the consoles themselves are pretty much PC hardware, so I can't imagine there are massive differences in the core programming between them.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    nofanneeded said:
    They will work in a Virtual mode for sure for xbox 360 titles , and given the new Xbox power it will be working faster than the original one and with even higher resolution and better fps.

    yes even Emulators sometimes work far better than the original consoles. SNES for example Emulators give you far better options on PC than the original SNES , all what you need is very powerful CPU that can lower the Latency you get from Emulation to the point it is not noticed at all.
    Yeah but that's not called native,the first PS3 models had PS2 hardware in them to run PS2 games natively,emulation is not natively.
    Reply