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Quite possibly the most impressive technological achievement in the console space last year was Xbox One backward compatibility, a virtual machine that somehow - miraculously - managed to run Xbox 360 titles on Microsoft's latest console. Progress has continued on this brilliant feature, to the point where we reckon it has a good shout in staking a claim as the most impressive console technological achievement of 2016 too. We've demonstrated time and again this year how Xbox One is now running Xbox 360 titles faster and more smoothly than original hardware - but this week's release of the BioShock trilogy highlights just how much faster it can be.So what's so special about the BioShock titles in particular? It's simple. The clear majority of console games operate with a frame-rate cap of some description - and it's usually set at 30fps. In these scenarios, Xbox One back-compat can only run the title with more consistent performance than original hardware - a tighter 30fps lock, if you will. However, the BioShock titles are different: tucked away in the menu system is the ability to run with a completely unlocked frame-rate. Not only is the 30fps limit removed, but v-sync is disabled too - meaning that the games are literally pumping out as many frames as the hardware can handle.
One of the features of the Xbox One backward compatibility virtual machine is that tearing is eliminated, so in the case of the BioShock titles, there is a fascinating opportunity here. From a gameplay perspective, we get a completely tear-free experience but more than that, we can get some idea of just how much faster the newer console runs older Xbox 360 titles. After all, if the frame-rate is unlocked on original hardware, it will be on Xbox One too (limited only by the 60fps limit added by v-sync). And to put it simply, the results are often brilliant. Turn off the original BioShock's frame-rate cap and there's an often explosive boost to performance on Xbox One, to the point where the title spends much of its duration running at 60fps with no tearing whatsoever - something that simply never happened on original Xbox 360 hardware.
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