Microsoft is reportedly looking at the possibility of freeing up Xbox One processing power dedicated to Kinect.

Yusuf Mehdi, the company's corporate vice president for devices and studios, told Polygon it was in the process of investigating whether this could be accomplished.

"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", Mehdi stated.

Before its launch in late 2013, Xbox One engineer Andrew Goossen explained that the console reserves 10 per cent of its graphics processing power for system processes including the multitasking Snap mode and Kinect.

"Xbox One has a conservative 10 per cent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing," he explained last October. "This is used both for the GPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode."

It is possible this 10 per cent reservation may not currently be fully utilised, and that Microsoft had reserved extra space aside in case future OS updates added more Kinect functionality that would have taken up more system resources.

At the time, Goossen said Microsoft planned to free up some of this reserved power to developers in future, offering a further increase in the system resources available to them.

"In the future, we plan to open up more options to developers to access this GPU reservation time while maintaining full system functionality," he replied.

Microsoft recently announced plans to release an Xbox One bundle without the inclusion of a Kinect sensor. This apparent reduced focus on Kinect suggests the company might free up this extra power that was potentially reserved for future Kinect features that ultimately may never appear.

Posted: May 14, 2014 6:18 am
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/463625/microsoft-investigating-possible-processor-gains-on-kinect-free-xbox-one/