Xbox Series FPS Boost Might Require Some Games To Reduce Resolution or Disable Effects

Xbox Series will start to get more FPS Boost games in the coming weeks. The head of Program Management, Jason Ronald has explained how it all works.

In an interview with YouTuber Colteastwood, Jason Ronald talked a bit about how they are planning to achieve the FPS Boost for backward compatible games.

Colt asked about the limitations of the support and whether it will be available on the original Xbox One games or offer support for the Xbox One X enhanced games as well. This question came up in response to Watch Dogs 2, which runs at 900p on the Xbox One, and thus the FPS Boost allows it to retain this resolution on the Xbox Series consoles but effectively double the frame rate.

Jason replied that this is something that they have to look at on a title by title basis and suggested that they have to look at all factors e.g resolution and effects to determine if the FPS Boost will lead to performance improvement or not.

“So, it really comes down to the performance of the title that determines whether or not we enable it or not, ” said Jason. “Like, I said, you know we’re doing this all treating the game as a black box so we can’t change the original source code.”

“We’re kind of testing these titles. In some cases, we’ve actually determined that if we lower the system resolution just slightly while the game’s running we can reach that effective doubling of that effect frame rate. So, like, that’s a great example of why we enabled this to be in the player’s choice because some players will choose to prefer resolution over frame rate, and other players will choose frame rate over resolution. So we put the control in the player’s hands.”

Jason mentions that in some cases, for titles where they think they can free up resources, they disable effects like anisotropic filtering to free up GPU resources and achieve their desired target with FPS Boost. He also mentions that some games might already run at 60 FPS on Series X but they also want to support Series S so they will attempt to bring that FPS Boost for both Series S and X in order to benefit both players. In the end, it all depends on the title and they take a look at each case to determine the best outcome, which doesn’t necessarily mean the best resolution or visuals.