The Xbox Series S will not be able to play Xbox One games with Xbox One X enhancements, but it may be able to double frame rates of older games.
Speaking with Digital Foundry, Series S System Architect Andrew Gooseen revealed how developers can improve how X1 games run on the new console by changing three lines of code.
We made it easy for existing Xbox One S games to be updated to run with double the frame-rate when played on Series S as well. When games are updated, existing games can query to determine whether they’re running on the new console. And in terms of the performance, the Xbox Series S provides well over double the effective CPU and GPU performance over the Xbox One, making it pretty straightforward for the games to do this. And in fact, the Series S GPU runs the Xbox One S games with better performance than the Xbox One X.
There’s no real perf tuning necessary when you do this, and so often it’s just as easy as changing three lines of code, and then the game works.
There are times, however, that games may need some more changes to run properly on Xbox Series S at double their frame rates, but Andrew Goossen stressed how easy it is to fix these issues. As the process is not automatic, however, not all Xbox One games will take advantage of this.
Even when it’s not that easy, the fixes are still pretty minor. We had one triple-A title where doubling the frame-rate really worked perfectly, except that the crowd animation was twice as fast as normal. And so, those sorts of fixes are typically very, very easy for developers to go fix. We’re working with game developers and publishers to update [their titles]. It’ll basically be select games that run at a doubled frame-rate on the Series S.
The Xbox Series S, alongside the Series X, will release worldwide on November 10th.
