The Xbox One reserves 10 per cent of its graphics processing power for system processes including the multitasking Snap mode and Kinect.

That's according to Xbox One engineer Andrew Goossen, who told Eurogamer, "Xbox One has a conservative 10 per cent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing. This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode."

He went on to explain, "The current reservation provides strong isolation between the title and the system and simplifies game development - strong isolation means that the system workloads, which are variable, won't perturb the performance of the game rendering."

Microsoft recently confirmed it has increased the Xbox One's CPU clock speed from 1.6 GHz to 1.75 GHz, and upped the console's GPU clock speed by around 6.6 per cent.

Goossen goes on to say that Microsoft aims to free up some of that 10 per cent of 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," said Goossen.

Microsoft has confirmed an Xbox One release date of November 22, 2013 in 13 markets. The Xbox One price has been set at £430 / €500 / $500.

Posted: Oct 02, 2013 7:32 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/432045/xbox-one-reserves-10-per-cent-of-gpu-power-for-multitasking-kinect/