Xbox One GPU speed increased since E3, says Microsoft

Microsoft corporate vice president Marc Whitten has spoken about some of the changes and additions Microsoft is making to the current Xbox One development kits, including an increase to the GPU's clock speed and a new graphics driver.

Speaking on the podcast of Microsoft spokesperson Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, Whitten said, "This is the time, and this is the thing I think people are going to see as we get into Gamescom and people get their first look at new things since E3. This is the time where developers have the final dev kits in their hands, they're really working closely with us on how things have come together. There's some things that have really started to come together quite well."

Whitten also said that Microsoft's internal beta for the Xbox One was currently running and that the hardware manufacturer was releasing daily builds for the console's operating system.

New additions to the Xbox One hardware since it was last shown at E3 include a new graphics driver and an increase to the GPU's clock speed, says Whitten.

"Since E3, an example is that we've dropped in what we internally call our mono driver. It's our graphics driver that really is 100 percent optimised for the Xbox One hardware. You start with the base [DirectX] driver, and then you take out all parts that don't look like Xbox One and you add in everything that really optimises that experience. Almost all of our content partners have really picked it up now, and I think it's made a really nice improvement."

"This is the time where we've gone from the 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. Either your theory was right dead on, or you were a little too conservative, or you were a little too aggressive. It's actually been really good news for us, and an example of that is we've tweaked up the clock speed on our GPU from 800MHz to 853MHz."

The Xbox One will launch this November for $499/€499/£425.