Xbox One Backwards Compatibility Sucks

cthulhuiscool

2[H]4U
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Mar 15, 2006
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So despite my better judgement (considering I have a decent pc) I picked up a xbone black friday bundle, the reason pushing me over the edge being backwards compatibility. Having tried to play a few games now... it just sucks. Like it's beyond buggy, and should be considered in alpha stage of development at best.
My experience as follows:
Halo Reach: Completely unplayable. Laggy, unresponsive, with broken audio on SP. Coop lasts maybe 10s before breaking and needing a reboot.

Gears of War: Works, but lots of annoying bugs resulting in the need to restart previous checkpoint or even restart the game.

Gears of War 2: Same as above but also with fairly constant framerate dips

Gears of War Judgement: Very buggy, borderline unplayable

Seems shameful that they'd let this feature see the light of day in the current state. Anyone else had grief playing BC games on their end? Or maybe I've pulled the short straw and got the worst of it?
 
I've been playing Just Cause 2 alot on it, and even through Windows 10
No issues at all. Pretty comparable to 360. I've seen nothing but issues with Reach. Hope they fix that one soon.
Gears of War hasn't messed up on me yet. I might play it some more later to see if i have same thing.
 
Haven't had any issues myself. Haven't tried Halo Reach yet. Just played GOW (original) with my niece yesterday.
 
Those are all 1st party titles! yikes, you think M$ would ensure at least those work...
 
Those are all 1st party titles! yikes, you think M$ would ensure at least those work...

The main benefit to supporting backwards compatibility was just saying it worked, not actually making sure the games ran at 100%. When you see Reach, it is obvious MS knew damn well the game was broken. They simply recognize most people won't even bother however fanboys will still throw it around in arguments.
 
Yeah, Reach is busted and not worth playing until they update it. It's all over the place.

Not all backwards compatibility is broken like those games, though. I haven't heard many problems with Gears, though -- so that is interesting. I've played a few titles without incident.
 
When it was revealed at E3 I was really excited for it as it sounded like it would be very extensive. Unfortunately that is not the case. The backwards compatibility list is short and weak overall, consisting mostly of just first party games (I'm guessing there isn't much third party support). The performance is very poor in some games that are more desirable to play from the list which is also unfortunate. I feel like this was just a marketing strategy from MS to have something the competition didn't, but they haven't really looked into ensuring that the backwards compatibility list games are fully functioning. Just another bullet point they can add to their list of features.
 
From the few games I've played through backwards compatibility I don't find the experience that much worse when compared to the Xbox 360. I thought Gears of War was pretty good. I did think Mass Effect was terrible, but going back and replaying it on the Xbox 360 didn't make that much better. I didn't realize how much the framerate drops even on the 360. I did play Plants Vs Zombies for a while and no issues with it. From the framerate tests I've seen on youtube the framerate dips in similar areas on the 360. Its just that the 360 does it will drop to 25 and the xbox one will do it at 20 or 22. Another issue is that vsync is forced on the xbox one and not the 360. So the framerate drops feels more significant then the xbox 360.

I'm actually impressed with it from a technical perspective. Never thought they could get the 360 emulated on the Xbox one and maintain anything close to playable framerates. I also think this is just the first step, I think the next generation Xbox is to have backwards compatibility and with having stronger hardware will provide a better experience. Which doesn't do anything to address performance now.
 
To be fair I have been trying to play all of the above games on split screen coop with a roommate. It's possible the added strain could make them bug more than usual.
 
I don't agree at all. Every B.C. game i've played has been great. Even stopped into Gamestop the other day and bought Mass Effect for 360 to play again and played without a hitch. Thoroughly enjoyed the shit out of that game.
 
I have not had any issue with backward compatibility thus far. Mass Effect runs exactly as it did on the Xbox 360, and Fallout 3 runs even better. I think the only game that legitimately has issues is Halo Reach. People need to go back and play these games on their 360 to put things in perspective if they think games are running poorly.
 
I have not had any issue with backward compatibility thus far. Mass Effect runs exactly as it did on the Xbox 360, and Fallout 3 runs even better. I think the only game that legitimately has issues is Halo Reach. People need to go back and play these games on their 360 to put things in perspective if they think games are running poorly.

exactly! Halo reach is being worked on the great thing is they can update any of the games and have done several so far. Reach is getting fixed.
 
Everything's worked great for me. Haven't played Halo Reach on it.

With as much attention they are putting on this, they really should have made sure that a game is 100% before releasing it to the BC library.
 
I haven't had any issues, although I will admit I haven't tried any of the Gears of War or Halo games. I have tried a handful of regular, retail titles, along with a few XBLA games, and they seemed to perform just as well as they did on the 360.
 
They just rolled out updated for most of the above listed games, and it really seems to fix a lot of things. Good on MS for at the least fixing it after a problem has been shown to exist.
 
This makes sense though. The XB1 CPU really isn't that much more powerful then the X360 CPU, so you are going to take a performance hit just on the translation from PPC to X86, not to even consider the emulator layer running on top of everything. This is why CPU heavy titles (GoW, Reach) run significantly worse (in the 30-40 FPS range). It's also likewise why you see games from earlier on in the 360's life cycle being emulated, while later ones are not (Example: ME1, but not ME2 or ME3).

This highlights why Sony went with the "Do it elsewhere and stream it" route. Especially since in Sony's case, the CPU got WEAKER between the PS3 and PS4, so software emulation would be impossible.
 
I grabbed Deus Ex Human Revolution yesterday. A few areas of slowdown, not sure if those areas also did poorly on the 360, and one hard lock forcing me to quit the game manually. Other than that it plays great. Just Cause 2 and Defense Grid run fine.
 
It has always been fine for me... I played through the gears games again. I did notice is you exit the game to the overlay the game doesn't run as well when you return. A hard reset fixes that problem.
 

Based on the numbers I've had access to:

The 360's CPU has a peak performance rate of ~100 GFLOPS
The PS3's CPU has a peak performance rate of ~220 GLOPS, with a typical performance rate of ~160 GFLOPS
The XB1/PS4 CPU has a peak performance rate of ~110 GFLOPS.

In Sonys case, even factoring in the difficulty in using the Cell CPU well, the PS4's CPU is a clear downgrade. In MSFT's case, it's a push. The major improvements on this generation of consoles is the amount of RAM, and the massively more powerful GPUs. But the CPU side of the consoles is not impressive in the least. That's why it's not surprising to me several developers (Ubisoft and CDPR) complained VERY early on they ran into CPU performance issues, and why you aren't seeing improvements in gameplay (more enemies on screen, better AI, etc) that you saw in previous generations. The consoles CPUs simple can't handle it; they're already tapped out.
 
Based on the numbers I've had access to:

The 360's CPU has a peak performance rate of ~100 GFLOPS
The PS3's CPU has a peak performance rate of ~220 GLOPS, with a typical performance rate of ~160 GFLOPS
The XB1/PS4 CPU has a peak performance rate of ~110 GFLOPS.

In Sonys case, even factoring in the difficulty in using the Cell CPU well, the PS4's CPU is a clear downgrade. In MSFT's case, it's a push. The major improvements on this generation of consoles is the amount of RAM, and the massively more powerful GPUs. But the CPU side of the consoles is not impressive in the least. That's why it's not surprising to me several developers (Ubisoft and CDPR) complained VERY early on they ran into CPU performance issues, and why you aren't seeing improvements in gameplay (more enemies on screen, better AI, etc) that you saw in previous generations. The consoles CPUs simple can't handle it; they're already tapped out.
They went for efficiency and lower cost this generation over power. Maybe the hope was that a more powerful GPU would make up for the relatively weak CPU. I think both companies ultimately wanted to avoid the reaction a $600 PS3 got on its release this time around. It seems to be working, as this generation of consoles is still selling at a faster rate than any previous generation.
 
I love my Xbox one, but only for next gen games, i tried BC with Black Ops and was met with a 7.8 GB download, 1-3 hours download time, with only a network data cap of 20GB per month it pissed me off completely, i dont want my new Xbone hard drive full with Xbox 360 games, i was under the impression you insert disc and play the game, lucky i didn't buy my Xbone for BC, and lucky my pc is still strong enough for all last gen games and they way much cheaper, but above all this, it played Black Ops with no problems at all (would have still been cheaper and faster with installing the disc on my pc)
 
I've seen nothing but issues with Reach.

What issues have you been having with Reach? I just started playing it over the weekend and it was unplayable to me. It felt slow and laggy. Is that what you're experiencing?
 
I love my Xbox one, but only for next gen games, i tried BC with Black Ops and was met with a 7.8 GB download, 1-3 hours download time, with only a network data cap of 20GB per month it pissed me off completely, i dont want my new Xbone hard drive full with Xbox 360 games, i was under the impression you insert disc and play the game, lucky i didn't buy my Xbone for BC, and lucky my pc is still strong enough for all last gen games and they way much cheaper, but above all this, it played Black Ops with no problems at all (would have still been cheaper and faster with installing the disc on my pc)
Yeah, the disc is only used for verification of owning the game. I'm under the impression with the rate at which games are being released that each game needs to have individual attention to get working on the Xbox ONE, which would explain the need to download the games instead of just running off the disc.

I would try to invest in a good external drive if you're running out of space. I bought a 6TB external for around $150 USD just for my XBONE, which will most likely last this entire console generation without needing to worry about managing space.

The bandwidth cap sucks, though, and unfortunately there is usually nothing you can do about it.
 
What issues have you been having with Reach? I just started playing it over the weekend and it was unplayable to me. It felt slow and laggy. Is that what you're experiencing?

Reach sucks on BC. But, its the only game I've came across so far that does. RDR is better, Forza is better, Gears of War (s) are better.
 
With MS's "Play Anywhere" focus, maybe we'll see an option to play these games on the PC at some point. Wishful thinking more than likely, but it's not totally crazy. Hell, it could even be an additional opportunity for them to sell old games to an audience that never owned them before.
 
I've been playing Just Cause 2 alot on it, and even through Windows 10
No issues at all. Pretty comparable to 360. I've seen nothing but issues with Reach. Hope they fix that one soon.
Gears of War hasn't messed up on me yet. I might play it some more later to see if i have same thing.
How do you play on windows 10?
 
I never use backwards compatibility as a reason to buy a system. If you want to play games for a certain system...own the system. It's just that much less hassle. The old games are never better on newer consoles.
 
I never use backwards compatibility as a reason to buy a system. If you want to play games for a certain system...own the system. It's just that much less hassle. The old games are never better on newer consoles.

While I agree on the first statement, the bolded part is wrong this time around. Many games do actually perform better on the Xbox One than on the 360.
 
While I agree on the first statement, the bolded part is wrong this time around. Many games do actually perform better on the Xbox One than on the 360.

Not with my experience so far. Hell, I can't even play Assassin's Creed 3 on the XBone yet, despite the fact I can play the first two and Black Flag. Can't play either of the Crackdowns despite being XB-exclusive. Oblivion doesn't work. Street Fighter doesn't work. It's abysmal compared to how many original XBox games worked on the 360 right from the get-go.
 
Not with my experience so far. Hell, I can't even play Assassin's Creed 3 on the XBone yet, despite the fact I can play the first two and Black Flag. Can't play either of the Crackdowns despite being XB-exclusive. Oblivion doesn't work. Street Fighter doesn't work. It's abysmal compared to how many original XBox games worked on the 360 right from the get-go.

But that makes sense. Going from the first Xbox to the 360, you had the same CPU architecture, just a lot more powerful. You could brute-force the graphics backend with reasonable enough performance.

For the 360 to XB1 though, you are using a totally different CPU architecture requiring a translation layer that will eat performance, while not having a significantly more powerful CPU to actually do this with (the 360/XB1 CPUs are roughly equal in absolute performance). Simply put, the CPU isn't powerful enough to brute-force emulation, so titles that were CPU heavy simply won't be emulated.
 
But that makes sense. Going from the first Xbox to the 360, you had the same CPU architecture, just a lot more powerful. You could brute-force the graphics backend with reasonable enough performance.

For the 360 to XB1 though, you are using a totally different CPU architecture requiring a translation layer that will eat performance, while not having a significantly more powerful CPU to actually do this with (the 360/XB1 CPUs are roughly equal in absolute performance). Simply put, the CPU isn't powerful enough to brute-force emulation, so titles that were CPU heavy simply won't be emulated.

No it didn't
The original Xbox had a x86 cpu and nvidia graphics while the 360 has powerpc cpu and AMD graphics. Actually the xbox has more in common with the xboxOne than the 360.
 
But that makes sense. Going from the first Xbox to the 360, you had the same CPU architecture, just a lot more powerful. You could brute-force the graphics backend with reasonable enough performance.

For the 360 to XB1 though, you are using a totally different CPU architecture requiring a translation layer that will eat performance, while not having a significantly more powerful CPU to actually do this with (the 360/XB1 CPUs are roughly equal in absolute performance). Simply put, the CPU isn't powerful enough to brute-force emulation, so titles that were CPU heavy simply won't be emulated.

As stated already that isn't accurate. The original Xbox had a Pentium 3 733MHz CPU and an nvidia GPU.

Now with scorpio rumored to have a better CPU then the XB1 I think the CPU performance on backward compatible titles will be much improved.

But to be honest I've actually had a good experience with all the 360 games I've played on the XB1 except for Mass Effect. To be fair that title doesn't run that great on the 360 which was surprising because the first time I played the game the performance and framerate of it didn't bother me at the time.
 
Halo Reach was just patched and it looks has improved alot.



I tried Reach on Xbox One after the patch and it is awesome now! Not only is the poor performance fixed but I can tell it runs a little smoother than on the 360. Massive improvement over what it was originally on Xbox One.
 
Installed the Reach update to my XB1 and I've been playing all weekend. Yes, it is finally playable, maybe even smoother than the 360 version.
 
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