Losing Kinect could improve Xbox One performance

Dropping Kinect has done more than lighten the price tag for Xbox One. It seems it could also free up valuable CPU power to be put toward running games.

Corporate Vice President Yusuf Medhi said (in an interview with Polygon) that it’s a matter of directing reserve CPU power once occupied by Kinect functions toward game processing. How exactly that would be handled, however, remains unclear.

“We are in discussions with our game publishers about what we might do in this space and we will have more to talk about soon,” he said.

Reallocating processing power from Kinect sectors could work to close the performance gap currently seen between PS4 and Xbox One—most recently demonstrated by Watch Dogs' performance—bringing the systems that much closer to parity. And with both systems now sitting pretty at $399, parity truly is the word to keep in mind, especially with Microsoft’s new Deals with Gold program bumping elbows with PlayStation Plus.

Microsoft won’t be abandoning Kinect, mind you. Medhi made a point to affirm the company’s intent of keeping Kinect in the foreground:

“We remain deeply committed to the Kinect as a core component of a next-generation console. We think that the bio-metric sign-in, voice controls of the menu, ability to say ‘record that’ and capture a moment of gameplay are all critical to the experience. We have never wavered from that since launch.”