122 PCWorld DECEMBER 2020HERE’S HOW XBOX SERIES X STOPPED ME BUYING GAMING PC
experiences—which
means that “normal” 4K
gaming on 60Hz
displays should be
smooth as silk. On
everything I tried, it
certainly was. (I’ll have
to save my pennies for a
4K/120Hz display,
which will cost several
hundred dollars more.)
All of those
performance
optimizations, of
course, affect virtually every game available to
your Xbox Series X—even older, notoriously
laggy games like Player Unknown:
Battlegrounds showed improvement. (Just
make sure that your TV or monitor supports
AMD FreeSync, or HDMI variable refresh
rates, and that your display cable supports
HDMI 2.1.)HDR, RAY TRACING GIVE
YOU WHAT THE PC CAN
OFFER
Don’t forget about the visuals, either. One of
the hidden features of the Xbox Series X is its
ability to “auto-tune” games for HDR,
provided that your TV or monitor supports it.
(Go to General > TV And Display Options >
Calibrate HDR For Games.)
That means every game
gets at least a little benefit
from HDR, even games that
weren’t specifically
encoded for it—something
you can’t get on a PC yet.
The effect isn’t quite as
good as a game that’s
specifically encoded for
HDR (like Microsoft’s
open-world driving game,There’s a quasi-hidden setting within the Xbox menu that allows you to set
up what you might call “auto HDR,” even for games that don’t support it.Evening in Legoland, within Forza Horizon 4.