Xbox FPS Boost Analysis: 60FPS/120FPS Back Compat on Xbox Series X|S Tested!

this video is brought to you by the logitech lightspeed wireless range of keyboards mice and headsets the benchmark in wireless gaming performance after teasing additional enhancements for backwards compatibility we finally have our first handful of games supporting what microsoft is calling fps boost the idea is to increase the frame rate of previous generation games beyond where they were previously capped without touching the code base so today then we're taking a look at the first few games to support this to see how this technique fares when compared against the original games running on original hardware for this video then i'm joined by richard ledbetter to discuss it hey john so this is really interesting stuff uh fascinating even because microsoft has already announced that uh it's going to be doubling the frame rate on certain legacy games we had a demo of fallout 4 and we've actually been able to run fallout 4 with double the frame rate using mods but this isn't the approach microsoft is using and curiously fallout 4 is not actually one of the first batch of games that supports it now i didn't have the chance to talk to microsoft about this but you did so why don't you clue us in a bit yeah that's right so for this first wave of titles we have some rather uh interesting choices i guess you could say essentially there's five games that support this feature far cry 4 watch dogs 2 new super lucky's tale ufc 4 and sniper elite 4 with ufc 4 being kind of the newest title on the list having just released kind of midway through 2020. now what's interesting here though is that of these five titles three of them lack support for the xbox one x which means that they were all running in the base xbox one mode uh but it's interesting because i did speak briefly with jason over at microsoft there jason ronald and um essentially they're doing this sort of at the d3d level there is no game code being modified here at all there's no ini adjustments nothing like that it's a technique where they're essentially sending data back from d3d back to the game faster than it originally did in a way so that the game itself thinks it's still running at the original frame rate so if a game was 30 and now it runs at 60 when using fps boost to the game at least as far as it knows it's still running at 30. it just looks like 60 frames per second now so it's it's kind of a weird trick that they're doing so it's i i like the idea though because it's very like it's this high level adjustment that can be applied to a wide range of titles and they even said that you know down the line we can see like original xbox and xbox 360 games perhaps it's fascinating it kind of reminds me of the kind of direct 3d injectors that you see on the pc only this is rolling out on the the console side and it's all fully validated fully tested that kind of thing but yeah curious that fallout isn't in the initial batch of titles and if it was it would be using an entirely different approach to the mod here but yeah some fascinating games uh in the lineup so why don't we go through them in turn i think we divided them up between us and some really interesting results here that's right so i guess the first big one that we looked at and perhaps one of the more ambitious i guess you could say is uh watchdogs 2 and you wanted to check this one i did but i guess it's it's worth noting that this one was actually released in 2016 so while it does support the ps4 pro with a high resolution mode it never received support for xbox one x which means it's limited to 900p but how does the rest of it play yeah it's kind of curious two different approaches really the ps4 pro i think from memory it was using 1800p checkerboard but it was still 30 frames per second what you're seeing here is pretty impressive actually it is still 900p but it is running at 460 frames per second and the reason i wanted to check this out first of all i've played it in the past and was kind of curious to revisit it uh but more than that it's actually quite a cpu heavy game because it is an open world title and there's a lot going on in terms of simulation and background streaming and whatnot so i was really curious to see how the series consoles would stack up i played it on both the series s and the x and well it's just a locked 60 frames per second start to finish doesn't matter if you're playing on series s doesn't matter if you're playing on series x they pretty much produce exactly the same results which is to say all of the issues that the xbox one s version had and there are many all cleaned up here and if we actually go back and look at the 1s version targets 30 frames per second that's the maximum throughput you're going to be getting but it does have a lot of performance issues specifically in traversal you can be just driving through the city you'll get bouts of screen tearing and drops to frame rate i've actually got a combat stress test scenario here which you can see running on the s-1s and the series s same scenario here where we're just trying to get away from some police but rather than trying to get away from them i'm just just just sort of staying in the same area and attracting as many police as possible you can see that the 1s really struggles series s silky smooth 60 frames per second so yeah i mean gpu side of the equation is is taken care of no problems at all locked 60 no more tearing and uh yeah i was kind of more concerned about the cpu side of things in running that open world but there's just no problem at all for the zen 2 cluster here it's just flat out 60 frames per second really impressive stuff um a bit disappointing you can't increase the resolution for the complete package but there it is it's definitely well worth checking out yeah that is interesting because you're right fundamentally with three of these games it is going to be equivalent on xbox series x and s so let's uh you know and that's actually true of the next game as well which is far cry 4. so this one was released in 2014 i believe and it's a beautiful game but again due to its release date it does not support the xbox one x which means you only get the one uh base machine resolution which in this case is unique because it actually runs at 1440 by 1080 uh whereas the ps4 version was actually 1920 by 1080 by comparison uh so it never looked quite as clean but it does use i think they called it hraa which was sort of a temporal uh take uh on anti-aliasing you know at a time when taa and such was still kind of in its infancy yes fascinating it's pretty effective i think right like it looks a little like softer obviously but it's it seems sharper than say just a 900p game yep definitely i mean the ps4 version was 1920 by 1080 full 1080p but it also used the hraa so you got the temporal accumulation there as well but i guess we can't have additional resolution with this uh out of the remit exactly but of course um being that this is you know part of the program you would expect the frame rate to improve that's exactly what we see here so uh just like with watch dogs 2 the game is bumped up to 60 frames per second and based on you know the time i spent briefly playing through some of the interest sections here it's a hundred percent locked very very stable 60 frames per second and even traversing the open world there weren't any like noticeable stutters hitches or anything that sort of got in the way of the experience and this is exactly the same on both series x and series s in comparison to this to the original xbox one s though it actually kind of highlighted this this was an example of a game that ran really well on both of the consoles at launch and i think we kind of lauded it back in the day for this as well because it delivers a pretty smooth 30 frames per second experience actually like it's not there's occasional little blips here and there but by and large it's pretty darn stable i would say so it's you know in that sense i think ubisoft did a really good job here technically speaking but obviously you know boosting up to 60 does make a big difference the game feels a lot better as a result and it's very very stable yeah excellent stuff i mean i kind of wish we'd had far cry 5 because that had uh the 1x support and obviously much later game really looks spectacular i mean we played it at 60 on pc but you know at the same time i kind of like the idea of going back to legacy games and giving them a bit of tlc and it certainly pays off here yeah absolutely uh but i think it pays off perhaps even more with the next title which is the other title that you spent time with and that's sniper elite four yeah so this is a really interesting one because i've never played sniper elite before so i went in uh sort of with no real expectations of what to expect uh first of all i tried it on xbox one s now this game is highly dynamic we can't really do a to b comparisons here because the scenarios are very very different from one game to the next uh but it's pretty clear to see what's happening on the 1s it's really not very good uh looking back at tom's coverage back in the day this game runs at 1080p on uh ps4 xbox one and indeed ps4 pro uh frame rate is unlocked or at least it was back in the day on the ps4 and the pro and well um it never quite hit 1080p 60 uh on either of the playstation platforms so xbox one s here it really is struggling i mean it's ah dear it's capped at 30 frames per second the tearing is just so obvious whenever it encounters any kind of issue challenging parts of the scenery caused a significant drops to frame rate even if there's a slight drop to performance you get full screen tearing which really detracts from the quality of the experience the game's kind of stand out x-ray kills all of those see performance uh dropped significantly down to the low 20s in the worst case complete with that eye of endings screen tears really not pleasant at all but i actually kind of really like the game and that's where the series s comes in to begin with because you know most of those performance drops are completely resolved it is for the most part 1080p 60 frames per second i think uh based on the outlook here you are getting a better experience than ps4 pro game is really really impressive however there are still scenarios some x-ray kills some transparency issues but do cause performance to drop from 60 frames per second and that's kind of fascinating but i also played the same levels through on xbox series x again it's 1080p you're not getting any boost to resolution there but the vast amount of extra horsepower the series x has does solve the issues i don't think it's a big deal i still think it's pretty tremendous on series s so yeah this is definitely one to check out especially as it's on game pass at the moment so if you've got a series console i highly recommend checking it out i had never played sniper elite four seen some footage here and there look quite amusing but i actually think there's a really good tactical shooter in here and uh it's well worth checking out and it just flies on series consoles so this is a big tick as far as i'm concerned cool that's great yeah i know the series has its fans uh for sure it looks good i haven't checked it out either though but uh the next title though i have played before and it's it's quite a fun little game this is new super lucky's tale which is kind of the sequel to the sequel of a game originally developed for the oculus rift so it's kind of a weird situation but essentially this is the first title thus far today though that does actually support xbox one x and the difference here is pretty vast i'd say like perhaps more so than usual because on xbox one x the game was already native 4k at 60 frames per second so it looks great but on xbox one s it's not only dropped to 1080p but it's also reduced to 30 frames per second yeah it's kind of weird right and i seem to recall there are also sort of blips and glitches on the one x version i'm not sure if that was cleared up with patches or whatever but yeah that was better in the new version because the original super lucky's tale had some more issues and this is the the new version which also showed up on the nintendo switch and everything so it's kind of an enhanced edition if you will but this is perhaps from my perspective the most interesting fps boost title at launch here because uh this one goes all the way up to 120 frames per second and this is true on both series s and series x okay and this obviously has a limitation this is one where you actually see a difference though because on series s like the 1s it is capped at 1080p whereas on the series x it's instead running that native 4k so you actually get a full native 4k 120 frames per second game on here and it's uh it's pretty darn stable i'd say and it looks really really smooth 120 frames per second for a platform game especially if you turn on something like um a black frame insertion looks really really good like super super clean in motion so it's kind of cool to see but i think more than the game itself it's more uh this this proof of concept that they can actually up a game all the way to 120 frames per second which i think is really potentially a game changer if this becomes a more common thing i would like to see other games take this sort of leap forward because it really adds a lot to these classic titles so the 30 fps 60 fps divide on the xbox one generation of consoles always seemed a bit weird to me because there was a vast resolution differential as well but i think what's impressive about this is that you know the series s typically taps into the 1s code path and we should have been seeing 60 frames per second here if we were if we were talking about just a doubling of performance but they're actually quadrupling it here yeah exactly and that's that's kind of the big surprise i think is that that's a significant boost in rendering demand there so it's kind of unusual to see because you know it's not if you look at the difference between like the the original 1s and like the series s it's almost kind of like the xbox one versus say the ps4 pro and you usually didn't see such a vast difference in performance between those machines but obviously this has the additional zentu cpu as well and various other enhancements that probably contribute to this because this is a unity game and often unity games sort of hit the cpu pretty hard which can explain some of the weird spikes it may have had in the past but either way it's it turned out really nicely here so that's that's great nice good stuff but the uh the the last game then uh this one's curious this is ufc four this one came out last year this already supports xbox one x and this one actually has two modes on the one x so let me lay these out first so if you play on an xbox one or one s the game is 900p at 30 frames per second now if you play on the xbox one x you have two modes performance and quality in performance mode the game is 1080p at 60 frames per second and in quality mode it is 1800p at 30 frames per second but in all versions i guess on both versions in all three modes all of the interstitial scenes the introduction sequences everything like that are all rendered at 30 frames per second no matter which mode you choose okay so when you come over to the to the series consoles then that means series s while it's still 900p everything now runs at 60 frames per second then on series x whether you choose quality or performance mode it doesn't really matter you can still choose both the game is also 60 frames per second across the board and i say that because that means all of the scenes the interstitial scenes the cutscenes the the in-game stuff the only thing that's still 30 is the menu itself and the pre-rendered fmvs which you know you can't really change that but everything that's rendered in real time is bumped up to 60 fps and it sort of smooths out many of the hitches that you would get especially with this sort of crossfades where they kind of have to render two scenes at once the 1s really doesn't like this and you definitely get some pretty weird performance wonky dips and even spikes there as well so i mean it's pretty clear-cut you know if you play this on the series x you're getting 1800 p at 60 frames per second and it looks really really good uh but even on the 1s it's good so the 1080p mode which was targeting 60 on 1x is still 60 on series x correct i tested that it does not boost it to 120. intriguing so i i think it's it's something that's not just like a straight doubling that's going on here it's just it's something they have to configure on the back end but yeah this game seems to be 60 fps across the board so i think in terms of an overall i don't know a delivery of proof of concepts this is all really really impressive stuff um it's just kind of the choice of titles that's kind of strange and also um the fact that three of the five only have uh xbox one support so they're kind of limited to 900p and 1080p yeah i agree i mean to me this this is kind of like a tech demo of stuff that's to come and it's really interesting to see that it works and it does work extremely well like all of these games are very very consistent now it really just comes down to why these games i mean i assume the reason is that these just happen to work really well and uh you know they're probably going through and it sounds like they spend a lot of time testing all kinds of different titles and fallout 4 is still being tested as well um but it's uh yeah i mean it's a weird way to put this step forward i feel like they could have used one more sort of like a big heavy hitting title here for this but if if if you overlook you know what the games are and all of these games are at least solid games it's just nothing like world shattering but the technology and the technique is interesting and promising jason also mentioned that there's some updates coming to the way this works from the user side where apparently you'll be able to sort of adjust things per game so like the fps boost setting auto hdr you should be able to turn this on and off i don't know if it's directly in this new update but that is coming as well so it can be adjusted per game they've also said they can make changes to things like anisotropic filtering if need be and various other little tweaks along the way to either improve performance or enhance image quality the weird thing is though is i you know it kind of reminds me of i mean we'll see how many titles they release but it kind of reminds me of the bespoke patches for uh games like ghost of tsushima and um what was it days gone and even god of war where those were ps4 pro games that all receive 60 fps sort of enhancements that work on ps5 and kind of feels like a similar thing here but based on what i've learned about what they're doing in the background it seems to be more like game agnostic where it just kind of works but there can be glitches and they kind of have to test and improve it to make it work with everything so i i suspect we'll be seeing more titles like this in the future yeah those titles on ps5 uh running ps4 code they did require the developers to go back in and patch the games presumably up update them to the question sdk that kind of thing whereas this is kind of more interesting in many ways because there's going to be many games probably all of these bar perhaps ufc 4 which um highly unlikely to get updated to the latest xdks so yeah so the ability to actually tweak at the system level to boost performance that way i think it's fair to say that all of the games are radically improved just by having baseline 60 frames per second support and far higher levels of consistency and performance than last year in systems i think it's a really worthwhile endeavor i'm really looking forward to seeing more and uh yeah but yeah very interesting choice of titles to begin with and i agree that we could have done with one kind of massive triple a juggernaut to to be the spearhead of sorts but i'll tell you what i really did enjoy uh checking out watchdogs 2 again and sniper elite 4 if i'd played that game on xbox one s to begin with i would have been i wouldn't have really stuck with it but the upgrade on series s and series x is really game changing and it really does uh bring the concept to the four and it's really enjoyable so in terms of discovery it's been a really useful tool too absolutely absolutely so i look forward to seeing what else they have in the works if you're watching this microsoft uh you've already upgraded sonic generations with xbox one x support so let's get that up to 60 fps shall we come on now but i think that's gonna do it for now though so thanks for joining me rich yeah it's been a pleasure and uh if you guys enjoyed this video as always be sure to like subscribe bring the notification bell check out our patreon and follow us over on twitter and until next time this is john and rich signing off a breakthrough in design and engineering the g915 features lightspeed pro grade wireless advanced light sync rgb and new high performance low profile mechanical switches meticulously crafted from premium materials the g15 is a sophisticated design of unparalleled beauty strength and performance meet g15 lightspeed and play the next [Music] dimension

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 318,290

Rating: 4.9071913 out of 5

Keywords: Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, back-compat, backwards compatibility, 60fps, 120fps, fps boost, digital foundry, double fps, 2x fps, xbox fps boost

Id: 7dxJFCgkNws

Length: 23min 19sec (1399 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mrappbrain]

TLDR -

1. No game data is being modified, no ini's are being tweaked.

2. The game itself thinks it's still running at the original framerate, so it could sidestep the problem of physics engines messing up at higher framerates.

3. We could see original Xbox and 360 titles get doubled framerates as well down the line due it being game agnostic.

4. Series S and X can run Watch Dogs 2 locked at 60fps with FPS boost. Completely locked 60, all issues with the one versions cleaned up. Just silky smooth overall.

5. Far Cry 4 also runs at a locked 60fps on both Series S and Series X.

6. Sniper Elite runs at close to a locked 60 on Series S but it can drop during transparency rendering and x ray kills, but it's an entirely locked 60 on Series X.

7. New Super Lucky's tale now runs at 120fps with Xbox FPS Boost on both Series S and Series X. This shows that FPS boost is capable of upping the framerate beyond just 60fps, and can do more than double the framerate(Series S runs the One S version quadrupled to 120fps).

8. UFC 4 runs at 60fps on all Series consoles. It's not doubled to 120fps even though the title already runs at 60fps in performance mode, suggesting that the tech lets them configure the framerate manually and isn't just simple doubling.

9. Xbox FPS boost will be manually configurable and game agnostic, like Auto HDR.

10. DF concludes that all of the games so far have been radically improved with no downside and thinks it's a great move by Microsoft with a lot of potential.

[u/Dave_Matthews_Jam]

Definitely an odd assortment of titles, but I’m sure they’ll add more with time

[u/Nie-li]

So fps boost with out a game patch ..thats soo cool ,

[u/Mr_MQChamploo]

You know what game deserves the FPS Boost treatment? Freakin’ AC Unity. The disc version of the game is buttery smooth without the patch, since there’s no implemented FPS cap. I don’t know if FPS boost is capable of pushing that up to 60, like how Far Cry 4 was. But goddamn would it play great with 60 FPS and patches.

Here’s hoping that Ubisoft cooperates, if needed. AC Unity is a beautiful game wayyyyyy ahead of its time.

[u/Cyimian]

If they do 360 games I would love Fallout New Vegas to get that option.

[u/SidFarkus47]

Oh shit I've been waiting for this

[u/hara0329g]

That's cool, i hope they will support it for Dark Souls 3.

[u/bjki1107]

I'm waiting for 60fps boost with Alien Isolation.

[u/RemVer251]

far cry 4 still looks phenomenal. Aged beautifully.