Xbox Series X can automatically add HDR to backwards compatible games

Microsoft has announced just about all the specifications of the Xbox Series X and the upcoming console appears to be able to provide backwards compatible games with HDR, even though those games never came out with HDR support.

An analysis by the video platform Digital Foundry, which received extensive information from Microsoft early on, shows that the Xbox One X enhanced version of Halo 5 will run on the new console with a “convincing HDR implementation.” That’s quite remarkable, because developer 343 Industries never released the game with HDR support.

Microsoft software developer Claude Marais showed Digital Foundry how a machine learning algorithm, leveraging Gears 5’s HDR implementation, is able to transform the SDR content of all backward compatible titles into an HDR experience. The images are analyzed using this algorithm, determining what needs to be brightened and then adding that in real time. Gears 5 is also known for its convincing HDR images.

Based on the information, there is no rudimentary conversion to HDR, where for example the SDR images are put in an HDR container, which often leads to fake HDR. A comparison between the original SDR version and the artificial HDR version shows that the HDR version has clearly higher peak brightnesses in the highlights, among other things, which is visible in the form of heatmaps. It also turned out to be possible to add an HDR implementation to the approximately twenty-year-old game Fusion Frenzy

According to Marais, this could theoretically be added to all games. It’s a system-level feature that’s part of the new console, so it should work for all compatible games that don’t have their own HDR implementation.

Based on the information released, it is clear that the Xbox Series X will get a ‘custom’ 1TB SSD and a Soc that consists of eight Zen 2 cores and runs at a maximum of 3.8GHz, with a GPU with 52 compute units. The CPU and GPU share 16GB of GDDR6 memory.