Call of Duty 2 Sees Huge Frame Rate Improvements on Xbox One, Analysis Says

Call of Duty 2 was recently added to the Xbox One backwards compatibility program, and now tech outlet Digital Foundry has analyzed the last-gen game and discovered that its performance is greatly improved on the current-gen console.

The Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty 2 featured frequent lurching stutters, despite its 60 FPS target ouput. Digital Foundry says it has a 16.7m render budget per frame, but it fails to hit that target consistently, which causes the game to run at 30 FPS for a moment before returning to the intended frame rate. The tech outlet found that running the game on Xbox One almost completely eliminated these dips. See for yourself in the video below.

Digital Foundry said that there is the odd drop here and there, noting the opening campaign mission sees the frame rate drop when there are many enemies on screen. However, this is rare, as the Xbox One's superior GPU handles things like alpha-based effects with little to no issue.

Despite this increase in performance quality, it's worth adding that the game still runs at its native 720p resolution and features the same visuals as it did on the Xbox 360. Watching the above video shows that it's a much smoother experience, though. It's surprising how much trouble the Xbox 360 had with handling the early Call of Duty game.

Backwards compatibility isn't supposed to make the game look nicer and performance gains like this aren't commonplace. Another game that benefited from becoming backwards compatible on Xbox One was Red Dead Redemption. The open-world western game keeps a solid frame rate more often than it did on Xbox 360. Additionally, some screen-tearing that was present on the last-gen console doesn't appear on the Xbox One.

You can see the full list of Xbox One backwards-compatible games here.