Xbox One GPU overclocked

Speaking to Major Nelson (aka Xbox community manager Larry Hryb) during a recent podcast, Xbox One chief product manager Marc Whitten has confirmed they are overclocking all Xbox One GPUs for better performance – from 800MHz to 853MHz.

The Xbox One is based on AMD hardware and is made up of an APU that has eight Jaguar cores and a built-in GPU that’s the equivalent of the AMD Radeon HD7770. The tight integration and cheap hardware has not gone down well with some fans who focusing on the apparent dearth of performance (on paper) compared to the Playstation 4.

Whitten remarked that they were in the final stages of console development, having tweaked their graphics driver to almost its full potential and fine-tuning the operating system and development tools that would allow any Xbox One owner to develop games on their console without having to invest in an expensive development kit.

“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. It’s a super exciting time.”

Whitten also spoke a little about the changes to the rules for independent developers to have publishers backing them before they can get their game on Xbox Live, noting that Microsoft was looking at any and all ways that they could make the Xbox One better. He confirmed that Microsoft was going to be announcing more features at Gamescom in August 2013.

The Xbox One is scheduled to launch in November 2013 at $499 for the US and Canada, £429 for the UK, €499 for the rest of Europe and a staggering Australian $599 for the people down under.