Xbox One Weaker Than We Thought, 10% Of GPU Power Walled Off For Kinect, Apps

Microsoft plans on making that extra 10 percent of GPU power available for use in games “in the future”.

At the present, Xbox One has 1.84 TFLOPS, compared to PS4′s 1.179 — PS4 holding an advantage of over 50 percent. But now, according to a Digital Foundry piece which as been confirmed by Microsoft, 10 percent of Xbox One’s TFLOPS is currently reserved for Kinect functionality and apps, making the console even weaker than previously thought.

Digital Foundry, however, has managed to spin this into a positive, with the site’s headline reading: “Microsoft to unlock more GPU power for Xbox One”. Surely, a more accurate title would have been: “Microsoft currently withholding 10 percent of GPU power for Xbox One”.

In any case, two of Xbox One’s architects revealed some tidbits to the site:

“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 technical fellow Andrew Goossen told DF.

“The current reservation provides strong isolation between the title and the system and simplifies game development – strong isolation means that the system workloads, which are variable, won’t perturb the performance of the game rendering. In the future, we plan to open up more options to developers to access this GPU reservation time while maintaining full system functionality.”

It’s no wonder so many developers have been encountering problems while developing Xbox One titles, some going as far as revealing that the console’s ESRAM has been a “pain” to use.

But it’s great news that Microsoft will make available that extra 10 percent of GPU power stored up for Kinect, yet it begs the question, what happens to Kinect? Does this mean we’ll soon see a Kinect-less Xbox One SKU shortly?

Share your thoughts.