Red Dead Redemption gets 4K treatment with Xbox One X support

Microsoft has announced that Red Dead Redemption will be the latest game to receive the 4K treatment on its Xbox One X console. 

Rockstar’s excellent open world wild west adventure has been available to play on the console before now as a standard backwards compatible 360 release, but the new patch means the game is finally able to take full advantage of the console’s power.

Other games that are set to receive Xbox One X enhancements include the Xbox 360 games Gears of War 2 and Portal 2, and original Xbox games including The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, SSX 3, and Star Wars Battlefront II. In total six Xbox 360 games and 19 original Xbox games will receive backwards compatibility enhancements.

If you want a look at just how good Red Dead Redemption looks, you can check it out in the comparison video below.

The tech that’s gone into each of these games Xbox One X enhancements is actually very clever.

The game still thinks its running on its original hardware (and its game code is completely unchanged), but the Xbox One X console processes its graphics differently. One particularly neat trick is to substitute in higher resolution textures for distant objects that would have previously used low-resolution versions to save on system resources.

It’s great to see Microsoft pour so much effort into making sure its old games work on new systems. It’s not just great for gamers, who don’t have to plug in their old consoles to revisit old favourites, but also for the community as a whole who won’t lose access to these classic games.

The new games are available to purchase from today, and as with all backwards compatible games you won’t have to re-buy them if you’ve got your original disc lying around.

Which original Xbox or Xbox 360 games are you most excited to revisit? Let us know @TrustedReviews