Microsoft adds Xbox FPS Boost 13 games from EA

I’ve recently hopped onto Titanfall 2, a game whose single-player campaign is criminally underrated, and I was thinking to myself: “It’d be really nice if the game had a 120Hz option so that I could really make the most of my OLED display.”

At that point, Xboss Phil Spencer kicked my door in, told me I was above-average height and then confirmed that a number of games on Xbox Series X|S were getting the FPS Boost treatment. He then gave me a free Fable 3 T-shirt, kicked my dog, and escaped on a Microsoft Flight Simulator-branded Boeing 747 via the fulton system.

Once I awoke from the concussion that I’d received from my PS3 falling on my head, I realised that it was all just a dream…or was it? Because just a few hours ago, Xbox announced that a crapload of EA games were getting their frames boosted to infinity and beyond. Infinity being 60 fps here and beyond being 120 fps.

Xbox’s FPS Boost pretty much doubles the frame-rate of a game, with the following titles getting the upgrade:

• Battlefield 1
• Battlefield 4
• Battlefield V
• Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
• Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare
• Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville
• Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2
• Sea of Solitude
• Star Wars Battlefront
• Star Wars Battlefront II
• Titanfall
• Titanfall 2
• Unravel 2

It’s worth noting that some of these games require you to activate FPS Boost via Xbox’s compatibility settings, which in turn results in the overall resolution being dropped to meet the increase in silky-smooth action. As for how Xbox FPS Boost works, it’s technomancer magic. “When we developed the technique, the first thing we did was look across the catalog and said ‘What games do we believe that we can actually make this technique work for?’,” Xbox program management director Jason Ronald explained on the Colt Eastwood YouTube channel.

We identified a large set of games, and then we started testing the games to make sure the games actually play as good as they should. In some cases, there were some games that we had on the list that we discovered would play great but occasionally we’d see animations run twice as fast, or maybe the engine was running so fast that it would break gameplay.

Some of the games actually ran too well and would crash, but Microsoft eventually got a handle on it. As for why you don’t see this feature pop up too often? That comes down to Microsoft wanting to respect the wishes of a publisher who may have its own remastering plans in mind, as well as the artistic vision of a game. For example, Sea of Solitude will support a 60hz display option but will still run at 30 fps as that is how the game was designed to be viewed.

You can find more info on the Xbox FPS Boost feature and how to activate it in this post by Major Nelson.

Last Updated: April 23, 2021