(credit: Photograph by ChipperMist)

Overall, we’ve been pretty happy just to have the ability to play select Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One since Microsoft first rolled out the feature back in November. Digital Foundry has spent the past few months putting this backward compatibility through its technical paces, though, and the site’s findings are a decidedly mixed bag.

While the Xbox One’s system-level forced vsync eliminates the screen tearing common to many Xbox 360 games, that benefit “sometimes comes with a penalty of lower frame rates,” as the site puts it. This problem is especially apparent in gameplay scenes with lots of moving on-screen characters; all that action puts additional stress on the tri-core CPU in the Xbox 360 and even more stress on an Xbox One trying to emulate that difficult chip architecture.

This means siginficant frame rate dips in the most hectic parts of games like Gears of War, Mass Effect, and Halo Reach. Those frame rate drops lead to noticable problems with the controls as well, as Digital Foundry says the system misses certain controller inputs amid the dropped frames during intense firefights and driving sections.