Xbox takes back-compat to new extremes, tricks old games to run faster

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Getting older video games to run on newer consoles may seem like a simple idea: the new boxes are faster, so older, weaker games should just work, right? Things never quite work out that way, especially when architecture changes dramatically between console generations, which is why we've been fascinated by Team Xbox's focus on "backward compatibility."

Microsoft's engineering team has already gotten hundreds of past-gen games to work on the Xbox One family (and beyond). Now, the engineers have broken ground on a completely different vision for backward compatibility: making games from the past, particularly the wimpy base Xbox One, render more fluidly on Series X/S. This new feature, dubbed "FPS Boost," is particularly interesting because it requires zero code updates injected into older games.

Not remasters; more like ReShades

Unfortunately, Microsoft's announcement about the feature on Wednesday fails to explain exactly how it works. Instead, it leaves the storytelling duties to the frame analysts at Digital Foundry, who got exclusive dibs on the story. In a Wednesday video breaking down how the feature works, John Linneman confirms that Xbox Series consoles, while processing older games' code, can "send data back from Direct3D [a longstanding API used in both Xbox consoles and Windows games] to the game faster than the original [consoles] did."

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