This week will be a big week for Bethesda games on Xbox platforms, as Microsoft just completed their $7.5 billion acquisition of the company and added 20 games starting from Fallout 4, to Doom, to Skyrim to Xbox Game Pass.
It looks like Xbox owners can now grab the extra little bonus very soon – on the current episode of the Major Nelson podcast, Jeff Rubenstein from Xbox unveiled that five Bethesda favorites will take advantage of the FPS Boost feature of Xbox Series X|S.
“Just using the power of Xbox Series X, we can make these games run at double the framerate or even 4-times the framerate, so five of these games that are now in Xbox Game Pass are getting the FPS Boost treatment. Dishonored Definitive Edition, Skyrim Special Edition, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Prey. You can expect an increase from 30 to almost 60 frames per second when you have FPS Boost on.”
Without any updates and patches from developers, FPS Boost can increase some backward compatible games’ framerate. Microsoft described this feature this way…
With certain backward compatible titles, we can make the experience even better, all with no work required by the developer and no update needed by the gamer. To that end, the backward compatibility team has developed FPS Boost, which employs a variety of new methods for nearly doubling (and in a few instances, quadrupling) the original framerate on select titles. Higher, steadier framerates make games visually smoother, resulting in more immersive gameplay.
While Skyrim and Fallout 4 are the biggest names on the list, the two Arkane games (Prey and Dishonored) are the ones that will be interesting to see, as they both felt a bit slow at 30fps. Microsoft confirmed that exactly when the FPS Boost will be available for the games mentioned above, but Microsoft has a plan to drop a big Xbox firmware update o March 16.
