Xbox Series X hands-on: The big back-compat dive begins [Updated]

A selection of perceptible performance gains

Speaking of "built for Xbox Series X," I can't easily take the current list of 1,000 working back-compat games and comprehensively answer what free gains we can expect on newer hardware. This issue will sound familiar if you followed Sony and Microsoft's mid-generation refreshes. PlayStation 4 Pro's "boost mode" and Xbox One X's default performance gains worked on a minority of existing software, as game developers traditionally focused on a single hardware spec. Why support higher resolutions or frame rates if a closed system has specific caps?

Nothing in the current preview-period list of games includes notes about special Xbox Series patches. (Microsoft has told us to expect Xbox Series-specific patches for select first-party games, such as Gears 5's eventual 120Hz patch, but I've yet to see any of those.) Whatever limits a game had on either base Xbox One or on the higher-powered One X, those transfer over to the $499 Series X.

In the case of certain games, however, "dynamic" systems for resolution and frame rate left the performance ceiling open for future consoles, whether designed for base Xbox One or for the newer XB1X. Series X can exploit these, but to what extent? Here's a cursory look at what I've uncovered thus far.

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds: The power proposition of Xbox Series X is only topped by this game's famously troublesome port to consoles, so the short answer here is... PUBG is still unstable (just like on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4). But Series X throws a new wrinkle into the mix: an inability to lock to a consistent frame rate peak, even in spite of its setting menus advertising "vsync" to cap the frame rate and prevent frametime spikes. Thanks to the power of Series X, this PUBG port can sometimes jump to 60fps, but it doesn't do so consistently.

Thus, playing this game is mostly an exercise in watching jumps from 60fps to 30fps and back, along with a spare few spikes beneath the 30fps threshold. Curiously, performance on Series X appears to be identical between both available modes: "performance" (close to 1080p) and "quality" (close to 2160p), so you may as well take the pixels. Ultimately, even with the hitches between 30 and 60fps, Series X performance is still a clear win compared to One X.

Grand Theft Auto IV: One Microsoft rep suggested I install and test this Xbox 360-era game, and it didn't take long to see why. Rockstar famously launched this game in 2008 with an unlocked frame rate, which hovered around the 30fps mark. When it received Xbox One X back-compat support a few years ago, we saw its frame rates jump closer to the 50fps threshold, which was better on paper but still left the game in a largely jumpy state.

Now, 12 years and $499 later, we finally have GTA IV with a near-locked 60fps refresh on consoles. This doesn't include any resolution boost beyond 720p, however, and it's hard not to imagine a higher-CPU patch getting this game up to at least a 1080p pixel count while sticking to 60fps. But, as with most past-gen games, expecting a publisher to move forward with a 12-year-old patch is sky-high wishful thinking; a locked framerate at a blurry resolution is better than nothing.

Devil May Cry V: This hack-and-slash revival from early 2019 already held a consistent frame rate at high resolution on Xbox One X... but only during gameplay. The game's copious real-time cut scenes, which crank up additional knobs for character detail, only run at roughly 45 to 50fps on both PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. These have jumped to a nearly locked 60fps on Series X. (Eventually, a DMCV "special edition" will come to Series X and PS5, but it's nice to see the existing game benefit somewhat on Series X as a free, inherent upgrade.)

Final Fantasy XV: FFXV's patch for Xbox One X compatibility added a few graphical modes, and one of those is even better on Series X. The "lite" mode sets in-game resolution to 1080p, then unlocks the frame rate—which normally leads to wobbly One X performance. On Series X, this locks much more firmly to 60fps, and it doesn't exhibit frame-rate stutter when maxing out.

Meanwhile, the game's default "high" mode combines a dynamic resolution with a 30fps ceiling, dropping beneath 2160p as needed to maintain a 30fps refresh. That 30fps is much firmer this time around, while resolution is definitely closer to a full 2160p signal on Series X than on XB1X. Without discrete pixel-counting gear, or a built-in benchmark in FFXV's console version, I'm primarily left comparing like-for-like real-time cut scenes, which include pixel-revealing hairdos as served by Square Enix's Luminous Engine. The above gallery includes one particularly telling scene to show the game's resolution lead on Series X.

Monster Hunter World: This Capcom adventure game lets players choose from three visual performance options: "resolution," "frame rate," and "graphics." On Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro, "frame rate" runs at 1080p without quite locking to 60fps, while "resolution" and "graphics" run closer to 30fps with different visual benefits. It's the kind of experience that makes you wonder whether its design was ahead of its time, in terms of console generations.

Sure enough, this is a showcase title for Series X, because it offers an automatic frame rate upgrade for all modes without any patch needed from the devs at Capcom. A locked 60fps in the 1080p "frame rate" mode is a great start. Even better is the "graphics" mode, which adds additional visual flair (particularly an increased "level of detail" setting) to the 1080p resolution while getting very close to 60fps on Series X. The not-quite-4K "resolution" mode lands closer to a 55fps average—a tad jumpy, but totally doable for a Monster Hunter game (and outright smoother than the lower-res "frame rate" mode on Xbox One X, which is quite a free feat).

Nier Automata, Project Cars 2: I'm lumping these two together because they each support Xbox One X with higher resolutions and higher, unlocked frame rates. Both games avoid maxing out at 4K resolution on XB1X, which remains the case on Series X. Both games also push XB1X to performance extremes in certain scenarios (boss battles in Nier, and rainy, 32-car packs in PC2) that drag the frame rate closer to 50fps with visible screen tearing or frame time spikes. On Series X, the difference is clear: both games run more efficiently, at apparent 60fps locks, albeit without any bonus pixels.

Auto-HDR: A free upgrade, with no CPU/GPU impact

The above list is brief, because there just aren't many of these kinds of games in the preview period's 1,000-strong selection. That being said, I was unable to counter these examples with surprising downgrades in performance or pixel count. I've yet to boot a back-compat game on Xbox Series X and see any alarming issues, red flags, or apparent incompatibility issues. Instead, I've seen the occasional stutter in a game's boot-up sequence, or one weird occasion where booting a game resulted in an HDMI error with my 4K TV; swapping from one game to another fixed that one.

The other bonus applied to nearly every game is a new "auto-HDR" toggle, which can be enabled or disabled on a system level. With this turned on, pretty much every back-compat game on Series X receives an automatic tone-mapping upgrade to the HDR-10 standard, as driven by Microsoft's machine learning model, to find and boost obvious specular highlights (a sun in the sky, flashes of fire, car headlights) to the top of your HDR-compatible set's brightness rating. This is aided by Xbox's new, built-in HDR calibration tool, which asks players to confirm minimum and maximum brightness levels as based on sample images. (The tool will eventually roll out to other HDR-compatible Xbox consoles.)

Auto-HDR works without touching a game's original color depth, so as not to artificially oversaturate any existing color grading. But more impressively, this is built into Xbox Series X's display controller level, thus not touching either the CPU or GPU. It's a free toggle.

Due to how HDR imagery translates to standard SDR Web content, I can't show you exactly how it looks. For the most part, the effect is welcome, especially in games like Halo 5, which Microsoft clearly paid closer attention to as a first-party showcase. But it's not an across-the-board win, particularly with driving games. In games like the Xbox 360 version of DiRT 3, auto-HDR doesn't consistently recognize taillights—the things you'll see more often than anything else in an average race—so other auto-mapped highlights look more artificial.

I'm hopeful that Xbox Series consoles eventually offer a per-game toggle option, instead of making it a universal one, because when it works in older software, it's a fun surprise—especially the explosion-filled, bike-balancing madness of the original Trials HD.