What do you think the Microsoft Xbox FPS Boost technology is?

It seems to be a backward compatibility feature for older games to boost their performance.

Apparently it does not touch the games code base.

Could it be...

• MS hacking older games to change their frequency on newer hardware.
• Converting DX9 calls to DX12 in the drivers.
• Some clever AI driver technology that works out how to multi-thread old code.
• Surely they would need to change the game input/movement deltaTime logic that could be locked to 30 fps.
• Some kind of clever tweening system that works out the in between frames?
• And just enable a DLSS style feature to boost resolution.

How do you think this might work?

 

Meanwhile Unity struggle to get multi-thread render thread working
Maybe they should hire that Microsoft AI

 

The same way as playing an old game on a new PC? That's fundamentally what's happening. There is no magic. Games which were made for current hardware ~7 years ago are being played on current hardware now. Both bits of hardware are just mass-produced PCs.

Console games do sometimes have frame rate caps, so it could be that those are being changed or disabled, or something along those lines. Basically changing a setting, probably after checking that it doesn't break anything. Or, I remember that in the early days of UWP it had limited access to Xbox One hardware, which was later expanded significantly. It could be that something like that applies to games from previous consoles?

Either way, I doubt that there needs to be any kind of hacking, conversions, clever AI or other fanciness. The console is several times faster than the old one, so the simplest answer is to just use some of that newly available speed.

 

If the game is relying on vsync counts to cap its framerate but is known to use framerate-independent logic, the OS can simply lie and report two or more vsyncs per frame and cause the game to jump straight to the next frame instead of waiting.

 

Yeah I was thinking it had something to do with lying to the game about how much time has passed. I don't know how framerate was enforced on the old consoles though.

 

Guys come on, converting single threaded < DX12 code to multithreaded DX12 or Vulkan is a big feat (if thats what they area doing). We could need that for Unity since they dont seem to work on it them self