Can the Kinect-less Xbox One be more powerful than the PS4?

 

The recent release of the Xbox One’s Software Development Kit (SDK) by hackers has shown just how big of a blunder the Kinect was for Microsoft’s console.

The Power is yours! Partially

As reported by Eurogamer, a hacker group going by the name H4LT revealed the information when they leaked the November 2014 Xbox One SDK, including the development tools, firmware and documentation, to the public. This was obviously great news for the hacking community, but for us average gamers it also provided some interesting insight into how the console has changed since it launched and how big of a blunder mandatory Kinect functionality really was.

One of the odd things that came out of the Assassin’s Creed Unity glitchapalooza, was that the game appeared to run much smoother on Xbox One as compared to the PlayStation 4. The improved performance, such as it was, was rather baffling to many onlookers, where the technical superiority of the PlayStation 4 was taken as a given. With the leak, we now have some insight into why that may be.

The short version goes like this: Since October, Microsoft has been giving developers access to an additional processing core on the Xbox One’s 8-core CPU. This basically means that the Xbox One now has access to more processing power than it did at launch and thus makes it more powerful than the PlayStation 4, since both consoles originally only gave access to six of the eight available cores. At least that’s what the Xbox One fanboys will tell you. Not being an engineer, I was no idea if that's true or not.

Only between 50-80% of that core’s power is available and there are limits as to what developers can do with it, as Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry explains:

“Firstly, developers need to give up custom, game-specific voice commands in order to access the seventh core at all, while Kinect’s infra-red and depth functionality is also disabled. Secondly, the amount of CPU time available to developers varies at any given moment – system-related voice commands (“Xbox record that”, “Xbox go to friends”) automatically see CPU usage for the seventh core rise to 50 per cent. At the moment, the operating system does not inform the developer how much CPU time is available, so scheduling tasks will be troublesome.”

That probably explains why we haven’t seen a sudden performance boost in Xbox One games across the board, though I imagine few gamers would object to losing Kinect functions in favour of better performance. This is especially true since the Xbox One can be bought without the Kinect, which means that a portion of the CPU is literally being set aside to do nothing.

So why limit access to two of the eight processing cores, in the first place? Originally, for both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, those ring-fenced CPU cores were reserved for the operating system. As can be seen in Microsoft’s case at least, that much power isn't required to keep the OS chuggin’ along if they’re willing to give up 50-80% of the core’s power to better game performance.

More importantly what this shows is that Microsoft insistence on making Kinect mandatory was a bigger blunder than most would have thought. It limited the Xbox One not just from a price perspective, but also from a performance perspective. Without Kinect, the Xbox One would have had price parity with PlayStation 4 - which has helped to shift consoles tremendously - and all the stories about its poorer performance would probably not have been in evidence.

Kinect was a great innovation that just didn’t work as a general gaming application, but Microsoft’s bullheaded persistence in forcing gamers to use it has cost them daily. It has seen the Xbox One lagging behind the PlayStation 4 by a ridiculous margin when it really didn’t need to be that way.

On the plus side, at least Microsoft have seen the light and with Kinect essentially out of the way, the company is slowly re-jigging the Xbox One to better make use of its resources. It may not be too long before we get a headline claiming the Xbox One is more powerful than the PlayStation 4 and that sentence might actually be credible.