Tweet
In our first look at Rare Replay, we concentrated on the firm's classic N64 titles, noting that the firm had utilised two different approaches to emulation in bringing its classic catalogue onto Xbox One. Where Xbox 360 remasters were available, Xbox One's shiny new backwards compatibility functionality was utilised to excellent effect, while the rest of the titles employed direct emulation of the original consoles, with no actual remaking or remastering in play - though the 1080p resolution boost was clearly worthwhile.Taking a look across the rest of the package, we see emulation is also employed to bring almost every game in the line-up onto Xbox One - with one glorious exception. Rare's Microsoft debut - Grabbed by the Ghoulies - is treated to an Xbox One-specific 1080p60 conversion, seemingly ported over from the original source - and we'll be covering that later. But for the bulk of this article, it's the Xbox 360 line-up that gets the lion's share of our attention, offering up another opportunity to examine the technological credentials of Microsoft's remarkable virtual machine.
In our previous look at Xbox One back-compat, we found that some titles actually performed better on the system compared to the same game running on 360 (Perfect Dark Zero a case in point) while others showed a mixture of no improvements at all, or an actual decrease in performance. One curious element of the virtual machine is its seeming inability to support adaptive v-sync - on the plus side, this means that there's no screen-tear on Xbox One, but on the flip-side, this is almost certainly contributing to the issues surrounding games where performance doesn't compare well with the Xbox 360 originals.
Read more…
More...