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The ongoing work fine-tuning the Xbox One hardware has resulted in spec increases, Microsoft has revealed.
Specifically, speaking on the Major Nelson podcast Xbox chief product officer has confirmed that since E3 the company has upped the console’s GPU clock speed from 800MHz to 853MHz.
Since E3 we’ve dropped in what we internally call our ‘mono driver,’” he stated, as reported by Kotaku. 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.
This is the time where we’ve gone from 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 because either your theory was right dead-on or you were a little too conservative or you were a little too aggressive.
It’s just an example where we really get close to the final performance envelope of how the box works and really making sure we have a great product for our developers to build great games against.”
How Xbox One and PS4 compare to one another in raw graphical terms remains a matte of debate. Id’s John Carmack, for instance, says the two are systems are very close” and that both, incidentally, are very good”.
Analysis from Digital Foundry, however, suggests that PS4 possesses around 50 per cent more raw visual oomph on paper, although other factors see this translate to a real-world gain of approximately 25 per cent.
