Halo 5 Sees Massive Boosts From Xbox One X, Runs at Native 4K 60 FPS

Slowly, surely, Xbox One X owners are starting to receive their due vindication. With no boast of launch-day exclusives, Microsoft faithful were worried that the Xbox One X would be left in obscurity this holiday season, but now that the Xbox One X upgrades have been rolling out with some regularity, media and consumers alike are discovering that their Xbox One games are made new again by the Xbox One X's massive leap in power. Check out Digital Foundry's above analysis of Halo 5 to see how significant these upgrades can be.

The biggest upgrade? For the majority of your time playing, at least during indoor segments and smaller skirmishes, you can look forward to a rock solid native 4K resolution at 60 fps. True 4K gaming was the Xbox One X promise, and Halo 5 is delivering in a huge way. There's still a dynamic resolution system in place to keep the frame rate stable, and stable it is, though the resolution will drop as low as 2816x1890.

Still, that's a far cry from resolution dips we saw on the original Xbox One, which saw drops as low as 810p (yikes). That's an unfathomable leap from sub-native 1080p to native 4K, and it's one that 4K TV owners are going to celebrate.

Even if you don't own a 4K television, Digital Foundry notes that that 1080p gamers have a lot to get excited about as well. The Xbox One X, unlike the PS4 Pro, will automatically implement a down-sampling solution, which basically eliminates all signs of aliasing and make edges extremely smooth. You can obviously enjoy the greater texture detail and less detail pop-in as well.

It is noted that some of the strange lighting and shadow quirks from the original game are preserved in the Xbox One X upgrade, which can make for some awkward moments. Likewise, new areas are loaded from the hard-drive in real time as you travel from one area to the next, which can cause some slight stutters, but those are few and far between. Overall, you're looking at a vastly improved experience in terms of image quality and performance, and this is a trend we can't wait to see more of.