Disconnecting Kinect will not boost Xbox One performance, Microsoft clarifies

Owners of Kinect-less Xbox Ones will not enjoy a performance boost over those who choose to attach a camera to their machine.

That’s the clarification from Microsoft, which was forced to issue a statement after some corners of the internet misinterpreted yesterday’s news of a GPU boost in the most recent Xbox One dev kit.

The decision to make Kinect a non-mandatory part of the Xbox One offer means that the processing power once reserved for the device can now be employed elsewhere, should devs choose to.

Therefore games that don’t employ the camera have a bit more technical oomph to play with. But this is on a title-by-title as opposed to machine-by-machine basis.

"For consumers, simply unplugging Kinect will not impact the performance of Xbox One," Microsoft told Eurogamer. "The June SDK released to developers gives them access to additional GPU resources previously reserved for Kinect and system functions.

Accessing the additional GPU resources is done by the developer, and how developers choose to access the extra GPU performance for their games is up to them.

"For titles that ship in the future, if a developer has taken advantage of this SDK change they may access this additional GPU resource. We have started working with a number of developers on how they can best take advantage of these changes, and we’ll have more to share in the future."