According to industry insider Pete Doss, Microsoft is planning to release a patch which will draw back the amount of GPU power that its motion camera, Kinect, requires to function on its Xbox One console.
Currently, the Xbox One uses 10% of its GPU to help power the 1080p camera, with 8% of that figure used for the processing of the video stream received. Yet if these rumors are true, the future patch will remove the 8% requirement, transferring it instead to gameplay and graphics, leaving the remaining 2% for the camera’s voice input processing.
Since launching late last year, Microsoft’s latest generation home console has been under scrutiny for its apparent inability to play select multiplatform games at 60fps and 1080p. Both the latest Call of Duty and Battlefield run at 720p on the Xbox One and a respective 1080p on the PlayStation 4.
Speaking to GamesRadar, Tomb Raider executive producer Scot Amos said when talking about the PS4 version, “Looking here, this is the PS4 version running at 60FPS, again at 1080p.”
This follows website Rocket Chainsaw’s claims that “…the Xbox One build can technically reach around 45 fps, though this performance is generally only achieved during the most empty, simplest environments. For most of your play, and during action scenes, the Xbox One build will sit on around 30 fps.”
However, as pointed out by IGN, this patch is not expected to bring Microsoft’s console on par with the PlayStation 4. So, long story short, if Microsoft is able to roll out this patch it would leave game developers with a larger percentage of the GPU to utilize in their game’s development.
