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There are now well over 300 titles running under Xbox One backward compatibility, but arguably, this trio of releases are some of the most important. Grand Theft Auto 4 was a huge title in its day, its popularity only bolstered with the release of its standalone episodes - The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. All are now available to play on Xbox One, but is the experience as good - or better - than it was on original Xbox 360 hardware?We're currently in the process of testing all three releases, but we wanted to get some results to you as quickly as we could, so we concentrated efforts on the original GTA4 - and the results are fascinating. There's no doubt that frame-rates are improved over original hardware, and in many other back-compat titles, that's a very good thing. Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare offer up a tangibly improved experience on Xbox One, after all. GTA4, however? We're not so sure.
The key difference here is that the original game operates with an unlocked frame-rate, running above and indeed below the console-standard 30fps. New frames are delivered somewhat unevenly as a result, usually at 16ms and 33ms periods when the game is running well. On paper, Xbox One looks good. It hits the same performance level as original hardware, but can actually deliver anything up to a 5fps advantage. In terms of the quality of Microsoft's virtual machine, this is impressive - GTA4 hits CPU hard, in particular.
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