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Bundling Kinect with every Xbox One came at a price - and not just a financial one. Similar to PlayStation 4, two of the Xbox One's eight CPU cores are reserved for system functionality, but the Microsoft console's resources are further restrained by the way 10 per cent of its graphical power is allocated mostly for dealing with Kinect inputs. In the wake of the camera-free console announcement, will those resources now be returned to developers? And how much will it improve the games we play?In an interview with Polygon, Microsoft's Yusuf Medhi suggests that the resources will be returned, but is predictably short on meaningful specifics. "We are in discussions with our game publishers about what we might do in this space and we will have more to talk about soon," he says, but his staff in the Xbox engineering division have already gone into specifics on the details.
Digital Foundry readers will remember that Microsoft have already committed to lessening the impact of the substantial GPU reservation. "Xbox One has a conservative 10 per cent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing," Microsoft technical fellow Andrew Goossen told us just before the console launch. "This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as Snap mode," he said.
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