In the midst of announcing a massive drop of backwards compatible and enhanced games, Microsoft released a 500MB update to Red Dead Redemption enabling 4K on the world’s most powerful console.

This. Is. Fucking. Amazing.

Most observers reckoned 4K for RDR would never come due to the engineering of the game – many thought the resolution was baked-in for performance reasons. But it seems the Back Compat team at Microsoft are wizards indeed.

So how does it look?

Stunning.

I mean, it’s ridiculous how good it looks. The 360 version (which is also what ran on the initial Back Compat version) was noticeably blurry and shimmery, especially in motion. It still looked great though, and you did get the impression that R* had put a lot more under the hood than the hardware was capable of displaying. And now we know that’s the case.

The result is that Read Dead Redemption is now – again – a joy to play.

More Red Dead:

Finding John Marsden – A wonderful short doc from Polygon about Rob Weithoff, the voice of John Marsden

In depth review (thinreaper) – One of the best game reviews/critiques I’ve ever invested an hour and a half in