The Xbox One's graphics processing unit has been increased, bumping the system's GPU from the original 800MHz clock-speed to 853MHz. The 6.62% increase was confirmed by corporate vice president Marc Whitten in the latest podcast by Xbox LIVE director of programming Larry Hryb (better known as Major Nelson).
"This is the time, and this is the thing I think people are going to see as we get into Gamescom and people get their first look at new things since E3," Whitten told Hryb. "This is the time where developers have the final dev kits in their hands, they're really working closely with us on how things have come together. There's some things that have really started to come together quite well."
Elsewhere in the podcast, Whitten described the behind-the-scenes improvements to the Xbox One graphics driver and the speed boost to the GPU.
"Since E3, an example is that we've dropped in what we internally call our mono driver. It's our graphics driver that really is 100 percent optimized for the Xbox One hardware," Whitten explained. "You start with the base [DirectX] driver, and then you take out all parts that don't look like Xbox One and you add in everything that really optimizes that experience. Almost all of our content partners have really picked it up now, and I think it's made a really nice improvement.
"This is the time where we've gone from the theory of how the hardware works – what do we think the yield is going to look like, what is the thermal envelope, how do things come together – to really having them in our hands. That's the time where you start tweaking the knobs. Either your theory was right dead on, or you were a little too conservative, or you were a little too aggressive. It's actually been really good news for us, and an example of that is we've tweaked up the clock speed on our GPU from 800MHz to 853MHz."
The Xbox One is expected to launch in November of this year for $499.
You can listen to Hryb's podcast here for Whitten's full comments.
