We’ve long been told that the Xbox One will, in the absence of the Kinect, get a little bit of enhancement to its performance, and now we know little bit more about how exactly that will work. Speaking to Eurogamer, Microsoft Studios’ Ken Lobb discussed exactly how the process will work.
“Lots of people ask, ‘so, you’re taking back the GPU reserve for Kinect. Well, does that mean I can’t say, ‘Xbox, record that?’ No. You can always say that.
“So if someone says, ‘Xbox record that,’ it will work on 100 per cent of the games, if you have a Kinect,” and if you don’t have a Kinect, “it’s not like you have more RAM.”
So basically, the Kinect will work exactly when it is called upon, staying in the background at all other times, leading to the power boost.
“You have more GPU, so go ahead and use it how you want. It’s more GPU plus more bandwidth to the GPU, so they both matter. So for some games it might be resolution, it might be frame-rate, or it might be, let’s throw in more enemies.”
We already know that this move reaps dividends- for example, Bungie will be using the extra power to ensure that Destiny hits the right frame rates and resolutions on Xbox One.