Upon opening the box, you may find some surprises under the hood. Some changes and updates to the Xbox One are around there corner in addition to the previously rumored GPU increase before launch.
A major feature for the Xbox One, which requires an Xbox Live Gold membership, is the ability to capture the last five minutes of upload-able gameplay to twitch and potentially other services. The specifics regard the quality of the recording had been a mystery until an interview with Marc Whitten, Xbox One’s chief product office, stated that the footage will be captured at 720p and 30 frames per second.
This means the quality will not be as high at the game’s presumed 1080p and 60 frames per second output due in particular to the restrictions provided by the system’s DVR capabilities. Whitten goes on to describe the concepts for gameplay capturing and its process:
“The first thing you’ll see with our game DVR is the integration of our Upload service on the console. This service allows you to manage, edit, and share your content. Your clips are stored in the cloud. Also, you’ll see games making “magic moment” videos of your gameplay based on the game DVR functionality – all seamlessly integrated. You’ll be able to see these clips in the Xbox One Guide, in your own game DVR collection, and when you are looking at gamercards on the system. You’ll also see games take advantage of this platform capability and do interesting things to integrate captured game footage into the game experience itself.”
Another topic noted by Whitten were the Xbox One’s avatars. Current avatars may be transferred over to the Xbox One after a user’s Gamertag details are registered to the console. Additionally, Gamerpics will have full 1080p is support, which is quite an upgrade from the previous 64×64 pixels.
Finally, after reports of a rumored GPU upgrade to the Xbox One the details have been discovered. The last-minute improvement flaunts an increase of system speed from 800MHz to 853MHz, which in any case provides an extra oomph. Hopefully this snappy change doesn’t lead to instability in Microsoft’s latest console, again.