Microsoft overclocks Xbox One GPU clock speed by 6%

In a recent podcast with Marc Whitten, corporate VP of Xbox he revealed that the company was able to safely bump up the performance of the GPU on the console by 6-percent. Whitten didn’t elaborate much on this statement, but he did indicate that developers will be able to push the system a little harder.

During Major Nelson’s podcast, Whitten stated:

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, an example of that is we’ve tweaked up the clock speed on our GPU from 800mhz to 853mhz.

He also talked a little bit about new drivers that help take advantage of the GPU better called “mono driver.”
Microsoft’s Albert Penello elaborated on this improvement on NeoGAF boards recently. According to Penello, Microsoft set “aggressive targets for reliability, performance, yields, and noise.” This all makes perfect sense considering that the Xbox 360 was notorious for having a very high failure rate made popular by the Red Ring of Death stigma. The Xbox 360 originally sounded like a jet was taking off before several iterations of refinements were made to the console.
It seems like the company set out to improve on these things as the Xbox One is reported to be stealthily quite.

We want it to be DEAD quiet (and let me tell you, X1 is quieter than the new Xbox 360 we just released). And we wanted killer game performance. But those targets are in conflict with each other.

Penello adds that through testing, the team was able to find that the console could safely handle the bump in clock speed despite pushing the GPU beyond its set parameters.

What we’ve found through the development process is we were able to actually exceed our goals on the thermals and acoustics.
This gave us headroom to increase the clock speed without any hit to noise, reliability, or heat, so we took the opportunity to bump the GPU. I get it’s only 6% or so, but that could translate to a few FPS in the real world.

Posted in Games, Hardware, Industry, Microsoft, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 5 Comments » Read more from Mike Ferro
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