It Seems Difficult To Get Back Resources Reserved for Kinect

I noticed there is a misconception a lot of people seem to have that Kinectless X1 SKU would somehow easily open the door for Microsoft to give back the CPU + GPU + RAM resources reserved for Kinect to developers so future games could make use of them narrowing the graphical performance gap between X1 and PS4.

The problem with this is it requires Microsoft to completely drop OS voice navigation while in games in order to achieve that.

The reason for that is if Microsoft did give back those resources to developers, and developers took advantage of those resources in their future games, then there won't be any resources left for Kinect equipped boxes to listen, process and take action when users shout "xbox, record that", or "xbox, switch to TV", etc... while in games.

As the availability of those resources that were originally reserved for Kinect will no longer be guaranteed since they might already been utilized by the game engine itself.

So even if Kinect is not hooked up, Microsoft needs to make sure if you hookup Kinect and shout commands at it, it'll respond while you're in games. Hence they need to always make sure those resources are reserved.

To give up those resources, Microsoft seems to have only three options moving forward:

a) Drop support for OS voice navigation while in-game.

b) Requires you to pause via the xbox controller to activate voice commands (They could impose a policy on developers to give back those resources to the OS only on pause menu).

c) Have two tiers of games, ones that allow OS voice navigation while in-games, and others that don't allow OS voice navigation.

So what do you guys think? Is it worth it to gain back those resources? And if so, what's the best option Microsoft could take to give back those resources?

I doubt MS is going to change the way the console performs. They will just make a console without kinect.

Why not make Kinect to include it's own chips that it needs instead of using the Xbox's? That's what Sony plans to do for their VR. They could probably use some cheap ARM chip or something as I doubt it needs to do much processing.

How much is reserved for Kinect? How much is reserved for Eye Toy voice on PS4?

Maybe "Teh Cloud" will help with these issues...

I don't think the decision is difficult when only a fraction of consoles will have Kinect. I can easily see MS allowing devs to drop support of resources for Kinect during some games.

They've already started down this path. Kinect is now as much of an add on as the Nintendo Power Glove, whether we, or MS, like it or not. But just how much of an impact do you expect the added resources to have.

Plus wasn't there a rumor they were giving 8% back to devs?

2% on XB1, 0% on PS4 since it's mic-based