Microsoft’s Xbox Series X is set for a Holiday 2020 launch. With the current world situation, both Microsoft and Sony have changed the way they are going about revealing their next-gen gaming console, the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5. Both the companies have revealed important details like the hardware specs of their respective consoles, and Microsoft even revealed some games coming to the Xbox Series X earlier this month, with Sony expected to reveal new games for the PS5 early next week.

Ahead of Sony’s event next week, Microsoft is revealing new details about the Xbox Series X. This time, the company is focusing on Backward Compatibility, claiming the Xbox Series X will be the “most compatible” console ever.

Microsoft says backward compatible games on the Xbox Series X will run at the peak performance they were originally designed for, but it’s even promising better performance than their original launch platform in some cases. “Backwards compatible games run natively on the Xbox Series X hardware, running with the full power of the CPU, GPU and the SSD,” said Jason Ronald, Partner Director of Program Management for the Xbox Platform Team at Microsoft.

Xbox Series X will enable backward compatible games to run at higher, more steady frame rates while rendering at their maximum resolution and preserving visual quality. The console will also reduce in-game load times for backward compatible titles, mainly thanks to its new custom NVME SSD storage.

With the Xbox Series X, Microsoft is even adding HDR support to games that were released before HDR was even a thing. The company built a new HDR reconstruction technique that enables HDR support without impacting game performance, allowing the Xbox Series X to enable HDR support on Xbox 360 and even original Xbox titles released almost 20 years ago.

Microsoft has developed other new techniques that enable game developers to enable more backward compatible titles to run at higher resolutions and improved image quality without affecting the artistic intent of the original creators. In fact, Microsoft says the Xbox Series X leverages new techniques that will allow select backward compatible titles to run at 4K, while others will experience doubled frame rates. “We are also creating whole new classes of innovations including the ability to double the frame rate of a select set of titles from 30 fps to 60 fps or 60 fps to 120 fps,” said Ronald.

Xbox Series X’s new Quick Resume feature, which lets users resume games exactly where they left off and quickly switch between different games, can also be enabled for backward compatible games.

Microsoft says it has already completed more than 100,000 hours of play testing on the Xbox Series X, and it hopes to reach well over 200,000 hours of testing before the launch of the Xbox Series X. What this essentially means is that when the Xbox Series X officially launches later this year, thousands of games will already be ready-to-play.

Tagged with Backward Compatibility, Xbox Series X