Confirmed today on Major Nelson’s podcast by Xbox One chief product officer, Marc Whitten, Microsoft would appear to have made a few changes to the Xbox One’s hardware since it’s original announcement.
“This is the time when we’ve gone from the theory of how the hardware works – what we think the yield is going to look like, what is the thermal envelope, how do things come together – to actually having it in our hands,” Whitten explained. “That’s the time when you really start tweaking the knobs. Either your theory was dead on or you were too conservative or you were a little too aggressive. And an example of that is we’ve tweaked up the clock speed on our GPU, from 800 MHz to 853 MHz. Just an example of how you really start landing the program as you get closer to launch.”
Also confirmed was a change to the Xbox One’s graphics driver, “This is the time where developers have the final dev kits in their hands and are really working closely with us on how things have come together. Since E3, an example is we’ve dropped in what we internally call our ‘mono driver.’ It’s our graphics driver that really is 100% optimized for the Xbox One hardware.”
“It’s a super exciting time,” Whitten said. “This is the time when you’ve gone from all of these specs and all of these arguments over the last several years to having the product, and really starting to try it internally. We’re running our internal beta and using it at home and starting to see the product really come together.”
“The team is working really hard,” Whitten concluded. “The team is so passionate about shipping a great product so that people have a great experience come this fall. We’re just very, very focused on continuing to use the beta, take feedback, really refine the experience, work with our content partners. Every day it’s about ‘how do we make Xbox One better today?’”
How do you feel about this hardware increase to the Xbox One and do you think there could be a couple more upgrades in store for the console before it launches? Let us know what you think in the comments.