FPS Boost at 120fps: Battlefield, Titanfall and Mirror's Edge Catalyst tested

Last week, Microsoft upped the ante with its FPS Boost campaign, delivering 120fps upgrades for 12 Electronic Arts titles and an extra 60fps update for one other – and it’s a terrific bonus for Xbox Series console users, albeit with a caveat or two we’ll come to shortly. But to cut to the chase, every last-gen Battlefield game for Xbox One now runs at 120 frames per second on Series X, as does Titanfall and its sequel, and that’s just the beginning.

The full list of supported titles is reproduced below and as you can see, not every single game in the list gets an upgrade if you’re gaming on Xbox Series S – certain games are only 120fps-capable on the more expensive Series X. And in fact, in the course of our testing, we also discovered the price to pay for doubling frame-rate on the more expensive machine – Xbox One X enhancements (which usually manifests in the form of higher resolution) are disabled. So in essence, despite Series X offering twice the notional graphics performance of Xbox One X, we’re looking at often substantial reductions in resolution to make a consistent 120 frames per second happen. Where this happens, FPS Boost isn’t enabled by default – you need to drop into the game’s compatibility menu to enable it. So perhaps wisely, 60fps at a resolution more befitting a 4K display remains the norm.

The reduction in resolution perhaps explains why Xbox Series S support is missing in some games – we can only assume that they don’t sustain 120 frames per second when fully unlocked with FPS Boost, but this does lead to some strange disparities in support. For example, Titanfall 2 runs at 120fps on both Xbox Series S and X consoles via FPS Boost, but the first game only runs at double frame-rate on Xbox Series X.

For our testing, we chose our favourite games in the bunch: the trio of Battlefield titles, both Titanfalls and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. Battlefield 4 is an interesting game to start with – a launch title for Xbox One and limited to just 720p resolution, with post-process anti-aliasing that doesn’t hold up well to say the least. Unfortunately, FPS Boost cannot increase resolution, but the limited scope of the game does at least guarantee 120fps on Series X and Series S for the most part. Heavy use of transparency effects can cause some slowdown, which is more pronounced on Series S – especially in 64-player multiplayer, though we did spot some fleeting issues in an otherwise flawless 120fps campaign.