Microsoft is now in talks with publishers about increasing graphical performance for Xbox One games running on Kinect-less consoles.

Confirmation that Microsoft is actively discussing its ability to squeeze more juice from its machine comes from exec Yusuf Mehdi, who told Polygon that the topic was currently being broached.

"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.

Xbox One currently fences off a fixed portion of its GPU for handling system-level Kinect functions - such as the ability to listen for voice commands and recognise gestures, whether you're playing a game, using an app, or simply sitting on your dashboard.

Digital Foundry previously revealed that Xbox One reserves 10 per cent of of its graphics resources for Kinect and apps functionality, and that Microsoft was planning to open this space up for game development at some point in the future.

With Kinect-less Xbox One consoles soon to be on shop shelves, that point is now apparently here.

"Xbox One has a conservative 10 per cent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing. This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode," Microsoft's Andrew Goossen explained.

"The current reservation provides strong isolation between the title and the system and simplifies game development - strong isolation means that the system workloads, which are variable, won't perturb the performance of the game rendering. In the future, we plan to open up more options to developers to access this GPU reservation time while maintaining full system functionality."

Xbox One versions of multi-platform games have frequently failed to hit the resolution and frame-rates of PlayStation 4 versions. Not only is this a technical disadvantage, but a failing in the ongoing war of perception among gamers that PS4 is more powerful.

Just last night, Ubisoft announced that Watch Dogs would run at 792p on Xbox One, but 900p on PS4. Microsoft will surely be keen to close this gap as soon as possible.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-14-microsoft-and-publishers-mulling-kinect-less-xbox-one-performance-boost

*Hypothetical user*

"Excuse me MS, but does that mean my games will run worse if I actually like to have Kinect plugged in?"

And so the fragmentation problems they've created for themselves start.

"Kinect is so essential to the X1 experience that we now actively try to encourage developers to embrace the console without Kinect."

I don't think though that developers will use this power for resolution and rather more stable framerates.

Yep. MS went from "Kinect is core to the Xbox experience" to "Please unplug Kinect for the best Xbox experience"

Use the power of the cloud instead.

all the extra power and tech in kinect seems to be a pretty big waste now. its a magnificent piece of tech dont get me wrong. but its seems useless. no games on the horizon are using it it seems. and now microsoft seem to be ditching it all together. Sony made the better decisions to go with a cheaper less advanced camera but can still do the job they want it too.

Oh no, the truth comes out!

Would rather have Kinect functions and 720p, than try to match PS4. They still won't match exact, while losing UI functionality. The worst part is fragmenting the user base.

Probably still a few years off.

And you have to seriously wonder what unplugging kinect will bring to the table. A few extra fps? Better textures? 

Do devs now have to build their software around two seperate sets of resources? That's a lot of extra work for hardly any benefit.

While MS's move to remove kinect is probably for the best,  serious fragmentation headaches will result from this. Those extra resources will most probably just go to waste. One can argue anyway one likes, but this aspect of the situation is not ideal at all.