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Microsoft Relaxing Xbox One Kinect Requirements, Giving GPU Power a Boost?

Posted by timothy on from the full-speed-ahead-damn-the-torpedos dept.

MojoKid writes "News from gaming insider Pete Doss is that Microsoft is mulling significant changes to the restrictions it places on developers regarding the Xbox One's GPU. Reportedly, some 10% of total GPU horsepower is reserved for the Kinect — 8% for video and 2% for voice processing. Microsoft is apparently planning changes that would free up that 8% video entirely, leaving just 2% of the system's GPU dedicated to voice input. If Microsoft makes this change, it could have a significant uplift on system frame rates — and it's not clear that developers would necessarily need to patch the architecture to take advantage of the difference."

13 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is a 10% boost going to take 720p to 1080p? Or 1080p 30 fps to 60 fps? Not likely. Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point. Toying with 8-10% GPU consumption is insignificant in the big picture.

    1. Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      " Toying with 8-10% GPU consumption is insignificant in the big picture."

      I suspect that MS (and Sony) have no expectation of pulling a miracle out of their hat, or doing anything about the fact that consoles always become increasingly unimpressive vs. PCs as their release period drags on. However, given that MS is currently facing a modest; but somewhat embarrassing, graphical prettiness gap vs. Sony, they have a certain incentive to free up what they can to ensure that any comparisons are as flattering as hardware choices far too late to change will allow them to be.

    2. Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware by Kartu · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point.

      I'm not quite sure about that.
      PS4 has a GPU that is between AMD 7850 / 7870, when building your PC you'd pay 150+ Euro for the GPU alone.

      Despite "common knowledge" that "PCs are faster", at least if we can trust Valve's statistics (about a third of their PC users run games on an integrated GPU!), no it isn't.
      7870 is a good mid range GPU these days even in PC world.
      One could argue about underwhelming CPU part , but 8Gb GDDR5 and software written to use most of it's 8 cores makes up for it.

    3. Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Bear in mind that prices for AMD GPUs are a little inflated at the moment because of the crypto mining craze.

      All the same, $150 sounds about right for the GPU in a mid-range gaming machine. Machines at that level are often built 'unbalanced' - a weaker CPU mated with a more expensive GPU, on the assumption that most games don't fully utilise the CPU. You only see serious investment on the CPU for higher end gaming machines or workstations.

    4. Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware by Firethorn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Despite "common knowledge" that "PCs are faster", at least if we can trust Valve's statistics (about a third of their PC users run games on an integrated GPU!), no it isn't.

      Consider how many laptops are out there... My laptops have both integrated and dedicated GPUs, depending on when Steam's survey comes up they can get quite different results. For that matter I've been playing quite a few 'casual' games that shouldn't stress ANY CPU on my laptop.

      Also, to echo the AC - Source on the 7850/7870 thing? I know that all of my cards from the last 5 years handles 1080P rendering just fine.

      --
      I don't read AC A human right
    5. Re:Still lightyears off of today's PC hardware by Xest · · Score: 5, Funny

      I have all new gen consoles (Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One) and frankly think it's silly to get pissy about one or the other. The Xbox One isn't a pile of turd because even if it doesn't give you 1080p 60fps on everything it still has great games like Dead Rising 3 which gives you many tens of hours of some of the best gameplay going that you just can't get anywhere else. Similarly the Wii U seems all but dead, but Pikmin 3 was my favourite game of last year, and the likes of Lego City Undercover and Super Mario 3D World were excellent so I really couldn't give a shit about how crap the hardware supposedly is.

      Just figure out what games you like and buy whichever console has them. Most of the rest of what you read is just FUD, all the stuff about Kinect not being unpluggable and so forth was bollocks, you can, turn it off, unplug it, and throw it out the window if you feel like it and everything is fine. Both the PS4 and X1 have their quirks right now, the X1 is missing some UI functionality that the 360 had which is stupid and annoying, whilst the PS4's support for parties and online gaming is still worse than that of the 360s which is embarassing given it was the biggest criticism of the PS3 and they should've sorted that shit out by now. Despite these sorts of things it's stupid to say one is better than the other, sure BF4 runs at a slightly higher resolution, but it's also got less good exclusives - there are pros and cons to either system. If you're only getting one you just have to figure out which has the best ratio of pros to cons, but to me the biggest deciding factor would probably be the exclusives. I'm not into The Order, whilst Ryse and Dead Rising 3 were exactly my type of thing, but the PS4 is getting a new Uncharted game so it's really what sort of game you prefer, and ignore all the other bullshit, because it's exactly that, bullshit.

      Honestly, the only thing I really hate about the PS4 and X1 is they both seem to have been trying to compete for who can make their console look the most retardedly like a 1980s VHS recorder. I think Microsoft just about won that one, but it was a pretty fucking close call.

  2. Apples vs Apples by tuppe666 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point.

    Not in your or mine wildest dreams

    The PS4 from Wikipedia "The CPU consists of two quad-core Jaguar modules totaling 8 x86-64 cores. The GPU consists of 18 compute units to produce a theoretical peak performance of 1.84 TFLOPS. The system's GDDR5 memory is capable of running at a maximum clock frequency of 2.75 GHz (5500 MT/s) and has a maximum memory bandwidth of 176 GB/s. The console contains 8 GB of GDDR5 memory" for US$399.99, €399.99, £349.99

    vs

    For just the base unit of the PC for the same price http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Ins... Processor: Intel® Pentium® processor G2030 (3M Cache, 3.0 GHz), Memory (RAM): 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, 1600MHz-1X4GB, Storage (hard drive): 500GB Hard Drive, 3.5", 7200rpm, SATA, Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW Tray Load Drive, 16X, SATA Color: Black

    I am a bit tired of these comments being modded up in the hope of PC gaming making a comeback.

    1. Re:Apples vs Apples by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Radeon 7770 (~1.3Tflops) roughly matches XBONE @ $109
      Radeon 7859 (~1.8tflops) roughly matches PS4 @ $169 (139 with MIR)

      The 8 core Jaguar is crap. Any dual or quad core CPU will probably run circles around it, including Core2Quads. Take a 5+ year old PC, toss in a new GPU and your done.

    2. Re:Apples vs Apples by Sockatume · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'll be impressed if you can add 8GB GDDR5 and the rest of a SFF PC for under $330.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  3. Re:Why is a GRAPHICS Process Unit processing VOICE by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

    It might have something to do with the ability of GPUs to crank through FFTs like nobody's business...

  4. I can't be bothered with either by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From what I've seen the improvement in graphics from my PS3 to the PS4 or XB1 just isn't enough to justify spending the money on a new console. I think like a lot of people I'll be skipping this generation and seeing what comes around in the next 5-10 years.

  5. Re:Price breakdown. by Sockatume · · Score: 4, Funny

    You managed to match a $500 console using only $700 worth of parts and the assumption that you'll add a new $250 GPU in a year's time. By grabthar's hammer, what a savings.

    --
    No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  6. Re:Too little, too late by stdarg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The vast majority of my time on the Xbone so far has been in the Amazon Instant Video app. It turns out that the Kinect is (or rather, could be) a great tool for occasional user input. The irritating thing about using the controller in this scenario is that it turns off after some period of inactivity (which is still long enough that your battery drains pretty quickly). So if you want to pause, or move on the next episode, you have to turn on the controller and let it sync wirelessly with the console, which takes a good 5 seconds.

    Enter the Kinect.. now you can say "xbox pause" and it pauses. "Xbox play" resumes. "Xbox stop... yes... episode 6" goes to the next episode.

    In theory.

    The problem is, seemingly at random, one of the commands won't work. It opens up the xbox voice control screen which has some generic commands. It might say something like "Play is not available from here" or something. After many minutes of frustrating experimentation, it turns out that sometimes you have to say "select" before giving the same command that may have worked 2 minutes ago. So it's like, "xbox pause" then a few minutes later "xbox play... xbox.. xbox select.. play." That's dumb.

    The other problem is the app needs to be intelligently designed for voice control. Amazon Instant Video is NOT one of these apps. The voice commands map pretty directly to the controller commands, but of course the controller is much faster than the voice recognition. A good example of where that's annoying is rewinding and fast forwarding. "Xbox rewind" starts rewinding.. at 2x speed. So if you want to skip back 30 seconds, it'll take 15 seconds to do so. That's no good. So you can say "faster" which increases the speed. Of course, it takes the xbox a second to recognize the command. If you're rewinding 10 minutes, you end up saying "faster [pause] faster [pause] faster [pause]." It's obscene sounding and it takes forever. Then you let it go for a few more seconds... and "play!" But the voice control just timed out, so it's still rewinding. "Xbox play!" and a second later it starts, but you rewound a few minutes too far. And it's too much of a bother to fast forward.

    But that's mostly the app's fault, not the Kinect's.