Rage (Xbox360)
I've spent four hours playing Rage today via the Xbox Series backwards compatibility. (Is it emulation or real hardware?)
Anyway, for an Xbox360 game I think this looks really good and still holds up today. The speedy loading times certainly help as well.
I did try and play a while ago on the PS3. I don't know if Rage was pushing the PS3 to the limit, but as you turned around, you would catch models and textures loading in. Apparently you could alleviate this a bit by installing an SSD but you're still limited by the PS3's older SATA connection.
Having played this on my Series X, I don't know if the Xbox Series is almost void of this because of the modern hardware or if the Xbox360 version was actually the better machine with this game engine.
I completed Rage 2 a year or so ago when it was given away free on the Epic Game Store and loved it. The original game is essentially the same but on a much smaller scale. It's a balanced gameplay of driving and FPSs sections.
I LOL'd on my first encounter when I've if the bad guys shouted, "Where's that wanker!" 😆
Games using the id tech engine were often affected by visible texture pop in, and apparently the PS3 version was affected more than the 360 version, but the latter still was noticeably affected. Rage uses id tech 5, but I remember playing BRINK (id tech 4) on PS3 which had no mandatory install (it ran from the disc without installing anything to the HDD upfront), but used the HDD extensively for caching texture data. After I upgraded from the standard 5400 rpm HDD to a 7200 rpm HDD I remember texture pop-in was noticeably reduced.
Xbox 360 emulation on Xbox One or Series isn't really accurately emulating the hardware, instead it translates the original code to something the One and Series understand.
Is the xbone version even translation? I figured they just recompiled the game for the One since there’s a lot of differences in some games.
I'm not 100 % sure how it exactly works, but I think Microsoft recompiles/translates the games and you then download the changed binary instead of playing off your disc (which is also why texture streaming should be a lot faster).
This is most likely a process that's automated for the most part though. And I highly doubt it's recompiled from source, that's why I called it "translated".
Man, Brink had so much promise...