Microsoft has yet to reveal specific details concerning what’s under the hood for the Xbox One. Today, they gave us a little bit of a teaser.
Executive Marc Whitten appeared on Major Nelson’s podcast today and gave us some details in terms of the Xbox One‘s power. He specifically mentioned that they’ve increased the GPU speed on the console:
…we’ve tweaked up our clock speed on the GPU from 800 MHz to 853 MHz. Just an example of how you really start landing the program as you get closer to launch.
The speed increase seems great on paper, but people have been quick to point fingers back to the Xbox 360’s technical issues. Many are concerned about whether this clock speed increase will lead to technical failures. Xbox One owners would surely like to avoid another Red Ring of Death scenario. But there is something to consider: the fact that the console’s video driver has been specifically made for the thing.
Since E3 we’ve dropped in what we internally call our “mono driver.” It’s our graphics driver that really is 100% optimized for the Xbox One hardware.
You start with the base DX driver and you take out all parts that don’t look like Xbox One and you add in everything that really, really optimizes that experience. Almost all of our content partners have picked it up now.
In short, Microsoft made a special driver for their console and found out they were able to increase the GPU speed. The days of consoles being more powerful than their rivals are over. Unless were’ talking about the Wii U, of course.
Source: Kotaku, Major Nelson
