While it’s long been known that the next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles will be throwing colossal amounts of power at making the next generation of games look like nothing we’ve ever seen before, Microsoft has just revealed that it also intends to make your old Xbox games look bang up to date as well.
While demonstrating the Xbox Series X to Eurogamer recently, Microsoft showed the console running legacy titles enhanced with not just upscaled resolutions, but also convincing-looking high dynamic range. Even where a title has only ever been available in standard dynamic range.
Both these resolution and HDR upgrades for old Xbox games are delivered entirely by the Xbox Series X hardware, too; there’s no need for any software level input from the game developers or the Xbox backwards compatibility conversion team.
This means that the enhancements will be available from day one for essentially any title the Xbox Series X can run. And we already know that the Series X’s backwards compatibility support will include all Xbox One titles at a hardware level (ie, there’s no need for software emulation), as well as all the Xbox 360 and original Xbox titles that have been delivered so far through the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility project.
While the Xbox Series X is set to deliver truly next-gen graphics with its own games, it’s now also … [+] promising to deliver a massive shine and polish to all your old favourites.
Photo: The Xbox Series X (Microsoft)
According to the demonstrations given to Eurogamer, the resolution upgrades were apparently convincingly handling full resolution doubling, upping 1080p titles to native 4K via an upgraded version of the system that’s used for turning 720p back-catalogue titles into 4K on the Xbox One X.
Fun though more pixels always are, though, for many gaming and AV fans it will be the prospect of every game they play appearing in high dynamic range that really makes the Xbox Series X’s backwards compatibility efforts exciting. After all, on a decent modern TV the impact HDR’s much wider light range (and the wider color gamut that usually comes with it) can have on image quality is typically much more pronounced and far-reaching than the impact of extra resolution.
The only concern is that experience suggests how hard it is to get SDR to HDR conversion right. Many TVs have tried to offer their own built-in SDR to HDR video conversions over recent years, and in most cases the results have been unconvincing to say the least. Strained and unbalanced colors; flared-out bright areas; and exaggerated noise and object edging are just some of the problems HDR upconverters in TVs have struggled to resolve.
Ironically given that we’re talking about the Xbox Series X here, I’d argue that the only TV brand that’s done a convincing SDR to HDR conversion is Sony. Sony’s TV system only works, though, because it takes a very mild approach to the conversion process, producing only a relatively gentle HDR effect. According to Eurogamer’s experience, though, the HDR conversion the Xbox Series X applies to games appears to be the real deal, applying genuine HDR light levels on a believably relative basis to different objects in every game frame. There’s not just a general brightness boost across the whole image, and the most dynamic image highlights routinely track into light levels far beyond those contained within the standard dynamic range format the games were originally created in.
Intriguingly, the engine that’s creating this HDR effect is apparently based on the widely acclaimed HDR system used in Gears 5 (the glorious results of which I talked about in this earlier article).
I guess it helps, too, that the Xbox Series X has a far bigger processing ‘brain’ at its disposal for dealing with the HDR conversion than anything found in even the very latest TVs.
What’s perhaps most exciting about all this from the perspective of gaming and AV fans, though, is how much importance it suggests that Microsoft is attributing to the Series X’s HDR and 4K ambitions. And how keen Microsoft appears to be to combine the old and the new into one seamless, cutting edge experience.
Also, of course, the graphical lengths the Xbox Series X seems willing to go to for previous-gen titles inevitably raises hopes for the visual quality we might expect from titles developed directly for the Series X.
When the original PS4 and Xbox One consoles came out, their lack of support for true 4K resolutions and high dynamic range made them arguably out of date before they’d even gone on sale (something I covered in this now ancient article). It was no surprise that PlayStation and Microsoft ended up announcing more powerful consoles only months later.
With every new thing we’re hearing about the PS5 and Xbox Series X, however, it’s looking like this time it’s the TVs that will struggle to keep up with everything the latest consoles can do, rather than the other way round. And that, for me at least, makes them more exciting by far than the initial PS4 and Xbox Ones were.
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