According to a new report today, Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One entertainment console reserves 10% of its GPU power for the Kinect and app functionality. However, Microsoft may open this up for developers later down the road.
“Xbox One has a conservative 10 per cent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing. This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode,” Microsoft’s Andrew Goossen stated. However, Microsoft plans on opening up this additional GPU power for game development in the future, while still maintaining full system functionality.
In August of this year, we learned that Microsoft had increased the graphics performance of the Xbox One entertainment console to rival that of its primary competitor, the new PlayStation 4 from Sony. In fact, the Xbox One GPU had seen a GPU clock speed boost from 800MHz to 853MHz.
Microsoft explained that this boost in GPU clock speed was much more beneficial for the console than adding additional compute units (CUs). “The primary reason that the 6.6 per cent clock speed boost was a win over additional CUs was because it lifted all internal parts of the pipeline such as vertex rate, triangle rate, draw issue rate etc,” Goossen explained.
“We’ve chosen to let title developers make the trade-off of resolution vs. per-pixel quality in whatever way is most appropriate to their game content. A lower resolution generally means that there can be more quality per pixel. With a high quality scaler and anti-aliasing and render resolutions such as 720p or ‘900p’, some games look better with more GPU processing going to each pixel than to the number of pixels; others look better at 1080p with less GPU processing per pixel,” Goossen added.
We recommend heading over to the source link to read the entire interview with Microsoft’s Andrew Goossen. The Xbox One launches November 22nd.
