Microsoft today published an article in which Xbox Series X'sdirector of development, Jason Ronald, explains all the benefits of the new console's backward compatibility. Some were already known and others are welcome news: let's see them together.

After confirming that, as we knew, all Xbox One accessories and games (including those already backward from the past two generations) will run on the new console,Ronald explained that many of the backward-compatible titles will also benefit from several "automatic improvements" provided by the platform and will not require the processing of individual games as happened in the past.

First, thanks to the fast SSD and the benefits of Xbox Velocity Architecture, console architecture that thanks to the use of advanced compression and memory management techniques makes data transfers between SSDs and GPUs/CPU even faster, backward-competitive games will enjoy significantly faster uploads and The Quick Resume,that is, the ability to "freeze" a game session to start other games and then return to the first title by starting again from the exact point where we left it.

Then there's the performancefront: thanks to the great power of the console not only will all the backward-composing games be able to spin at their maximum frame-rate without the drops we could see on Xbox One today, but some of these will also enjoy a doubling of the frame-rate, from 30 to 60 fps and from 60 to 120 fps. Ronald explains that the retrocompatibility team has developed a technique that achieves this by maintaining the artistic vision of the original development team, but mentions that this will be applied to "a selection of games", indicating that this technique will probably require additional processing on the games in question, such as those that have been upgraded to Xbox One X during this generation.

Another great news, which we mentioned in the past, is the addition ofHDR support to all backward-competitive games, including those developed 20 years ago when HDR did not yet exist. Thanks to technology that uses Artificial Intelligence to reconstruct HDR colors from an SDR image, we will be able to enjoy more vivid colors, dazzling lights and deep blacks in many titles of the past. Can you imagine what it will be like to play an old Splinter Cell with HDR support? We can't wait to try it!

Add to that the improvements that the backward compatibility team has already been able to apply to many titles in the first Xbox and Xbox 360, such as increasing resolution to 4K and adding automatic anisotropic filtering (to improve texture perspective).

Ronald also revealed that, with the arrival of Xbox Series X, more games from the first two Xbox generations will be made backward,further increasing the "historic" catalog of titles that we can play on the new console.

In short, it's no wonder that Microsoft calls Xbox Series X the most powerful and backward-compatible console next-gen: it's hard to refute such a claim!