When the Xbox One launched, eagle-eyed gamers noticed that some of its releases were impacted by very ugly post-processing effects. After months of fielding complaints, Microsoft has finally released a patch intended to fix these issues. Games upscaling to 1080p look markedly better now, but some of the original visual artifacts remain in the Xbox One’s upscaling system.

At its core, the problem revolves around a number of effects that the Xbox One applies to games being upscaled to 1080p. For example, Killer Instinct renders natively at 720p, and uses the Xbox One’s built-in upscaling system to output a 1080p signal. Unfortunately, the original upscaling implementation also imposes a sharpening filter and a boost to the contrast of the image. The processing being applied actually accentuates the jaggies, and loses much of the fine detail in darker areas of the image.

With this latest patch, Microsoft seems to have disabled the sharpening filter. As you can see in the screenshot comparison above, the fine detail around the belt and hands are much improved. Unfortunately, Eurogamer’s comparisons clearly show that the contrast issue has not been addressed in any meaningful capacity. For most native 720p games, you’re still better off switching the Xbox One’s output to 720p, and letting your TV do the upscaling, to lose the ugly crushed blacks (pictured top). When it comes to games rendering somewhere between 720p and 1080p, there’s no easy solution available — the end result will suffer either way.

Of course, some developers are already working around this issue. Titles like Battlefield 4 are using custom upscaling implementations, so they bypass Microsoft’s quirks completely. It’s definitely easier to use the Xbox One’s built-in upscaling, but the extra work makes for a much better finished product. Also, native 1080p titles like Forza Motorsport 5 have no need for upscaling, so the crushed blacks are nowhere to be found. I wouldn’t hold my breath for a bevy of 1080p releases on this console any time soon. The Xbox One’s upscaler will likely remain an important component for a long time to come.

Keep in mind, the scaling system itself remains largely unchanged, so don’t expect to see 720p games stand up to the native 1080p experience available on other platforms. Third-party releases will continue to look better on the PS4 for the foreseeable future, but at least the upscaling is more tolerable without the sharpening filter. Let’s just hope Microsoft sees fit to fix the crushing issue sooner rather than later.