Editor's take: Notably, Ronald's usage of terms like "a hand curated list of titles" suggests that not all of the games in the Xbox back catalog will take full advantage of Microsoft's new hardware and techniques. Here's to hoping that your favorites make the cut!

Microsoft from day one set about to design the new Xbox Series X to be its most compatible console ever. Part of that design philosophy relates to backward compatibility and a belief that games should play their best on the new hardware.

As Jason Ronald, director of program management for Xbox Series X explains, backward compatible games will run natively on Xbox Series X with the full power of the CPU, GPU and SSD on tap. This means that games will run at the peak performance they were originally designed for and in many instances, even better than they did on their launch platform.

For some games, this will result in the doubling of frame rates from 30 fps to 60 fps or from 60 fps to 120 fps.

The custom NVMe SSD, meanwhile, will lead to significant reductions to in-game load times while a new HDR reconstruction technique will be able to add HDR support to games at the platform level, resulting in zero performance impact. Other innovations will allow select titles to be rendered at up to 4K resolution or with other visual improvements like anisotropic filtering.