Microsoft confirms XBOX ONE is 10% faster without KINECT.

When Microsoft announced they were cutting the mandatory cord on Kinect, Smarter People Than Me speculated that doing so could free up some processing power. Well, Egg Heads be damned. They were right. To the tune of a 10% performance boost. Yay! Yay? This is all rad and Hell, but if both parties in the NEXT-GEN (or is it now current gen?) DANCE OFF could release games specific to this new generation, that would be far more exciting than this.

The upcoming Kinect-less Xbox One will receive a 10 percent boost in its performance due to the stripping out of the peripheral, Microsoft told Eurogamer.

“Yes, the additional resources allow access to up to 10 percent additional GPU performance,” said a company representative. “We’re committed to giving developers new tools and flexibility to make their Xbox One games even better by giving them the option to use the GPU reserve in whatever way is best for them and their games.”

The company also confirms plans to release a new SDK this month, making it possible for developers to access additional GPU resources previously reserved for Kinect and system functions.

This follows last night’s tweets from Xbox head Phil Spencer confirming additional GPU bandwidth will be made available. The company head did not say whether this power boost was related to Kinect in any way.

In an interview with Polygon on the day of that announcement, Xbox executive Yusuf Mehdi said Microsoft was looking into making changes to the Xbox One’s software architecture, since the console reserved some processing power for Kinect. However, that was tied to the CPU, not the GPU.

Prior to the Xbox One’s launch, Microsoft made performance upgrades to the console’s hardware, boosting the clock speed of both the GPU and the CPU. [Polygon]