First-party Xbox One Series X games are initially backward compatible

Microsoft’s first-party games for the upcoming Xbox Series X will also be compatible with the existing Xbox One. That will stay that way for ‘a year, possibly two’, an Xbox kingpin said in an interview with MCV UK.

“Our games will run on the entire family of consoles for the first year, possibly two,” said Matt Booty, head of Microsoft Studios. This is to give gamers the feeling that they are making a ‘good investment’ by buying another Xbox One now. Nevertheless, new games will take advantage of the innovations and benefits of the upcoming Series X. Halo Infinite is an upcoming first-party game, in any case, as are Hellblade II and Grounded. Third-party studios are not obliged to build in cross-gen compatibility.

Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One Series X in December. It reports that the Series X will include a custom Zen 2 soc and it is believed the console will get a custom Navi GPU. In any case, the company mentions support for hardware-accelerated-ray tracing. The console will support frame rates of 60 fps in combination with a 4k resolution. This can optionally be increased to a maximum of 120fps. The Series X also has support for 8k resolutions and variable refresh rate. The manufacturer confirms the presence of an SSD that ‘virtually eliminates’ loading times. Furthermore, the console supports variable rate shading, auto low latency mode and dynamic latency input. The Xbox Series X will be released at the end of 2020 for an as yet undisclosed price.