Xbox Series X backwards compatibility, how does it work?

So if I get the XSX on launch, will any of my old games be upgraded in some way to possibly the X1X version? I have a X1S and it's obviously at the end of it's life. From what i'm understanding, we have to wait for them to update to be optimized for the Series X (most in 2021). But will I see any improvement when I play a backwards compat game like RDR2 on the Series X compared to the One S on launch? Will it at least get some upgrade comparable to the One X?

Thanks.

Hi,

For the Xbox One games optimised for Series X we will have to wait to see what comes out during and after launch.

All your other games will work as if they were running on an Xbox One X and then some. So, if you have Red Dead Redemption, it will run as it would run on an Xbox One X with its enhanced mode. All Xbox one games you own that have Xbox One X Enhanced features will have these features on Series X.

But it doesn't end there. All Xbox One games benefit from the power of Series X. This includes better framerates and more stable frame rates.

Honestly, you need to check out the Digital Foundry video regarding Xbox Series X backwards compatibility. You won't be disappointed.

@Bond007uk: This was exactly what I was looking for. So at least it will be just like playing it on an Xbox One X while getting some extra improvements just by using the Series X hardware all while waiting for the games to be fully updated and optimized for the Series X.

That was my only concern was I’d still be playing on Xbox One S quality, which I’m glad is not the case.

Appreciate the detailed reply.

I got a launch console and so far. I'd recommend waiting. My box has been super buggy and the whole experience has been poor so far. I too was curious how MS would handle the game installs and stuff, would they just work? Would there be updates? I figured it out kind of. I installed all my Xbox one games on my USB hard drive. Once the Series X was setup I plugged it in and that's when my issues started. No games would work on the hard drive. The console would just not do anything at first when I launched something then a few minutes later a pop-up would warn you it had to set up the game or something to that effect. But even after it finished none of my USB hard drive games would work. So I decided to copy the newer ones to the consoles SSD. This took a long time and after moving them the series X deleted them all and started downloading new versions. 500gb of downloads deleted without warning and because I moved them I don't have them on my Xbox one anymore. Even after that, I found my Bluray drive to be non-functional and not read discs, play movies nor launch games or game installs. Not until after I removed the USB hard drive did the Blu-ray drive start to work. So long story short I have no games that work from my Xbox one from the USB hard drive, The series X deleted all the new games I copied to it and wants to download newer versions and now I have over 500gb of data that needs to be downloaded, again. Also the speeds the downloads are happening at are a joke. 500kps sometimes stopping to barely 5mbit per second. My average download amount per hour is around 2 GB in the bandwidth usage page under network settings and I have a 30mb down 15 up connection. That is super slow for me as I typically can download around 14gb per hour. I was able to copy a game over via the network transfer and it went super fast. So the only game I have that works after 24 hours of messing with the Xbox series X is Apex. It looks glorious and plays great but man this waiting sucks. Also, MS has a bug in the OS that if the console goes to sleep your downloads stop. Everyone is having issues with it and it's set to sleep after one hour of use. So you have to change the console to always stay on to not stop your downloads. I feel this was deliberate on MS part but shady nonetheless. As far as the USB hard drive problems, After my downloads are done I'm hoping to tackle that. So far this has been the most frustrating console launch I've ever experienced. So long and short of it is if you don't need it right away, wait. Because the download throttling alone will frustrate the most sain person.

I always had issues early on suspending Xbox 360 games on XB1 (not sure if they ever improved that on XB1 but I just assumed suspension caused issues so I avoided that on XB1). On Series X suspending Xbox 360 games works like you'd hope it would.

How come hardly any original xbox games work on the series x? I thought they used an emulator inside it.