4K displays are seeing much more demand owing to the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. But what if you’ve only got a full HD TV?
Fear not though, because the Xbox One X brings a few features that 1080p TV owners can appreciate as well.
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Supersampling
Microsoft has already said that the Xbox One X will produce better results on a full HD TV, via the miracle of supersampling. This technique sees the console rendering an Xbox One X game internally at a higher resolution and then outputting it to the full HD screen for a sharper image nonetheless.
But does this process make a big difference? Well, Digital Foundry has taken a look at Halo 5: Guardians for starters. And the results are definitely noticeable compared to base hardware.
“If you’re playing Halo 5 on an Xbox One on a 1080p TV, you’re still getting sub-native image quality throughout. On Xbox One X, however, just the bump to 1080p offers a huge improvement but super-sampling takes things beyond that even,” the website noted.
Faster loading times
Another unexpected benefit is in the loading department, with Microsoft claiming a 50% faster hard drive, better CPU and faster RAM. How does this compare to the Xbox One then?
One YouTube comparison shows the Xbox One X version of The Witcher 3 loading in just over 12 seconds, compared to 35 seconds for the Xbox One S. Assassin’s Creed Origins boots into the game world in roughly 17 seconds, while the Xbox One S takes 42 seconds.
The difference is practically night and day then.
Unpatched games could also see improvements
Even if your favourite game doesn’t get a patch for Xbox One X, there’s a chance that it’ll still have a few visual improvements.
Titles that make use of dynamic resolution and/or an unlocked framerate are best positioned to deliver an improved experience, the extra grunt allowing for a more consistent or smoother experience. For instance, the unpatched version of The Witcher 3 actually runs at 60fps on Xbox One X, as it originally shipped with an unlocked framerate.
Eurogamer also found that an unpatched version of the CPU-heavy Hitman ran faster on Xbox One X, owing to the faster CPU clock speeds.
All games apparently see 16x anisotropic filtering as well, delivering improved texture quality.
Last-gen games will look better as well
Last month saw Microsoft announce that original Xbox games were coming to the Xbox One and Xbox One X. The company said that these titles would see four times the pixels on Xbox One (1080p), but the Xbox One X takes this even further, offering “up to 16X the pixel count”.
A few Xbox 360 titles will also be capable of running with a nine-fold increase in pixel count on Xbox One X, such as Oblivion, Skate 3, Fallout 3 and Halo 3.
