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Digital Foundry - Xbox One Backward Compatibility: Every Major Game Tested

D

dancrane212

Member
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-vs-xbox-one-backward-compatibility

https://youtu.be/_5VYl0pKbDU

Pretty good in-depth look at the biggest 360 games on XB1. No Deus Ex though.

But the bottom line is that for the most part, Microsoft has got it right here, and being able to centralise two generations of Xbox titles into one box is a highly compelling proposition. If some of the remaining performance issues can be eliminated or reduced this could become the best way to experience classic Xbox 360 titles. The removal of screen-tear, faster loading, and almost flawless integration with a modern console all makes for a great experience. As backward compatibility continues to evolve in 2016 and beyond we'll continue to keep a close eye on it and report back with our findings.
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Getting the Mako running at a locked 30 just gets me to wish the rest of the game ran that well. It makes me wonder, that if 360 BC gets carried over to the next-gen Xbox or eventually comes to PC, if a faster CPU could get us improvements across the board.
 
icespide said:
why even bother with BC if the performance is dog shit?
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Kysen said:
I give MS 6 months before this project is quietly sidelined. It makes zero business sense to go back and reprogram 100s of games for free and in some cases have the end result worse than the original. This is a more envolved task than the original Xbox emulation on 360 and we know how that went.
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Heh.
 
It's really technically impressive. It's a shame that it is not perfect, and that it is only for a portion of the library (even if that is entirely understandable given the execution), but I still think it is a big positive for the Xbox One.

I don't have any plans to buy and Xbox One any time soon, but if I ever buy one I will probably use this.

I'd be pretty confident in the next Xbox console keeping 360 BC and probable smoothing off the performance issues present in BC on the Xbox One.

An Xbox 360 mini without a disc drive would be nice, but I don't think MS will make one of those any time soon.
 
Thank you for making a new thread that better reflects the DF article OP, I just commented about this in the last one.
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I can only hope MS improves the performance in a number of the dicey titles, otherwise reselling them on the xb1 store or allowing them to be purchased at all on xb1 is a questionable decision.
 
Hope they test out Deus Ex soon, thats one im thinking is running better on the X1 from the couple of hours i've put in so far.
 
Zeta Oni said:
Hope they test out Deus Ex soon, thats one im thinking is running better on the X1 from the couple of hours i've put in so far.
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Didn't realIze it was free for Gold until it was too late to include it. I own the PC version so had never sampled it on Xbox. Planning to give it a shot, though.
 
dark10x said:
Didn't realIze it was free for Gold until it was too late to include it. I own the PC version so had never sampled it on Xbox. Planning to give it a shot, though.
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I mentioned it in another thread, but it would be good if you could include which version of the game and it's BC wrapper is running when you test them.

You could also track the improvement or the emulation in games that have replays or theatre modes.
 
Thanks for creating this thread with a neutral starting point!

Now I need to find some time to read the entire article. Thanks John for taking the time to create this article.
 
EvB said:
I mentioned it in another thread, but it would be good if you could include which version of the game and it's BC wrapper is running when you test them.

You could also track the improvement or the emulation in games that have replays or theatre modes.
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Great idea!
 
Digital Foundry said:
But the bottom line is that for the most part, Microsoft has got it right here, and being able to centralise two generations of Xbox titles into one box is a highly compelling proposition.
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I don't see how DF can make this statement given that they just spent the entire preceding article saying that most of the games were either "playable" or "playable with performance problems."
 
EvB said:
You could also track the improvement or the emulation in games that have replays or theatre modes.
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Would theatre modes generally be reliable? I don't tend to use them so I'm not sure if they typically match the performance of the game at playtime.. but depending on the implementation couldn't this have significant differences on CPU load, which appears to be the primary concern?
 
Synth said:
Would theatre modes generally be reliable? I don't tend to use them so I'm not sure if they typically match the performance of the game at playtime.. but depending on the implementation couldn't this have significant differences on CPU load, which appears to be the primary concern?
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You are right, it's not going to reflect CPU load from AI for example but it at least allows you to see whether the on screen load is impacting performance.
Whilst it may not reflect the exact experience that someone would have during a campaign, they are nearly 100% repeatable means that for comparisons they make for good benchmarks.
 
Zeta Oni said:
Hope they test out Deus Ex soon, thats one im thinking is running better on the X1 from the couple of hours i've put in so far.
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Yeah, I've never played on 360 before so i'm not sure how the performance was back then (played on PC first time), but only hit a couple of frame drop locations in my first 2 hours as well.
 
EvB said:
You are right, it's not going to reflect CPU load from AI for example but it at least allows you to see whether the on screen load is impacting performance.
Whilst it may not reflect the exact experience that someone would have during a campaign, they are nearly 100% repeatable means that for comparisons they make for good benchmarks.
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Heh, true... don't know what I was even thinking with that question now in hindsight, lol.
 
LewieP said:
It's really technically impressive. It's a shame that it is not perfect, and that it is only for a portion of the library (even if that is entirely understandable given the execution), but I still think it is a big positive for the Xbox One.

I don't have any plans to buy and Xbox One any time soon, but if I ever buy one I will probably use this.

I'd be pretty confident in the next Xbox console keeping 360 BC and probable smoothing off the performance issues present in BC on the Xbox One.

An Xbox 360 mini without a disc drive would be nice, but I don't think MS will make one of those any time soon.
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I've already played through a couple of BC games on my X1, which is something I didn't really expect to happen. They're just there: slightly older, uglier, sometimes a little shabbier, but still those games, there, in your library. No division. It's the best way to do it, I think.
 
Great job, Dark. In my own experience, I'd say only Gears Judgment, Reach, and ME1 exhibit what could be considered severe performance issues and you highlighted those. Dirt 3 also had some issues, particularly when changing camera views and rapidly using the rear view camera angle. Everything else seems very close, perfect, or even better than X360 for the other 115 titles out of the first 120. (I've probably played 80% of those since I have either access to them via gamesharing with my brother or because I bought them myself.) Even playing the newest non-official one leaked, Jeremy McGrath's Offroad, seems perfect. And TTT2, in its early look, seems extremely close, but in need of an update to sort out very occasional drops or slowdown. BC is really fucking good so far...better than it ever really had a right to be considering it is all software on a platform that isn't exactly the most ideal for emulating a last gen console like the X360.
 
This thread will end up with less than 50 posts in it. The ones that say a few games run poorly will be filled with 20 pages of posts asking why MS even released this.
 
Sucks that DF has mentioned some of these titled are "unplayable". As someone who never owned an Xbox system until Xbox One, BC has and hopefully will continue to be a godsend.

It'll allow me to play some of the biggest titles on X360 last gen. I managed to complete Gears 2,3 & Judgment with a few friends over a span of two weeks and thoroughly enjoyed those games. Didn't really notice framerate dip that often and when it did it didn't affect me.

Halo Reach on the other hand indeed did crawl but I didn't complain. I had fun and all I payed was $7 for a brand new copy of Reach via Amazon.

As a non X360 owner I'm grateful BC exists on Xbox One and that it's free unlike Sony's offering.

Here's hoping The Witcher 2, Alan Wake and loads of other games are made BC on Xbox One.
 
So to summarize the cutscenes run smoother but the gameplay is worse -_- Mass Effect hitting 17fps is just embarrassing.
 
Rudiano said:
So to summarize the cutscenes run smoother but the gameplay is worse -_- Mass Effect hitting 17fps is just embarrassing.
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Yes and no. Some gameplay scenes run better. The Mako stuff is much much smoother on XO but, yeah, combat can be super choppy.
 
flkraven said:
This thread will end up with less than 50 posts in it. The ones that say a few games run poorly will be filled with 20 pages of posts asking why MS even released this.
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Pretty sad, isn't it?

Ammo is ammo in the console war. Some people don't want to hear things are going good. They only want to hear things that are going bad.
 
The titles that I'm most interested in playing, the 360 exclusive combo of Gears of War 2,3, Judgement and Halo Reach, are either "Playable with slowdown" or completely "Unplayable". Hopefully they sort it out. Fingers crossed that Halo Wars performs better on Xbox One than 360, cause 360 performance for the game was janky as hell.
 
Great article. I'm happy to see that some games have the potential of running better on Xbox One, even if they are the less popular games right now. Hopefully some of those heavy hitters at least achieve parity in the future.
 
Nice video! The games seem to run fairly well with the exception of Reach and Gears: Judgement. Hopefully they'll be able to address that. I'm interested to see what improvements they'll make to the emulator going forward.
 
Honestly it's rather impressive what they actually managed to pull off so far, I wonder however if they can fix up Reach into a playable state.
 
dark10x said:
Yes and no. Some gameplay scenes run better. The Mako stuff is much much smoother on XO but, yeah, combat can be super choppy.
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It would be nice to see load time comparisons between the 360 (disc vs installed) and BC versions of games on internal HD vs SSD.
 
I haven't experienced frame rate drops as bad as those seen on the Halo Reach part and iv'e nearly completed it, i have it on a external drive, i wonder if that makes any difference.
 
Really interesting that the Mako sequences run so much better than anything else in Mass Effect on XO and smoother than originally on 360.
 
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