The last remaining German website I read reached out to Microsoft about the question we've all been wondering about.

According to MS the 10% were a very conservative estimate and Kinect doesn't use that much power of the system. X1 will have the 10% boost of performance without developers having to turn off Kinect functionality. MS wouldn't go into detail but said that at least it will be able to still receive and process voice commands.

The site is a very respected, independent and highly frequented computer magazine so please don't doubt this article.

http://www.computerbase.de/2014-06/kinect-funktionen-neues-sdk-xbox-one-bleiben/

My take on this is that it was kinda expected. Voice commands probably won't take away from the GPU resources. Full on Kinect games probably won't have this benefit but who cares about graphics for those anyway.

You sum it up at the end... But better be conservative at first and give room later than the opposite right!!!

If 10% is conservative number then I wonder what the real number is?

kinect will be and overpriced microphone from here on out. they should just release a kinect lite for $5 and give new users all the benefits of kinect without the high cost.

It's all about rounding I guess.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/175463-microsoft-to-boost-xbox-one-gpu-performance-by-making-kinect-optional

Microsoft requires that all games reserve 10% of the GPU’s capacity for the Kinect, even if the game doesn’t use it. That’s split up into 8% for the Kinect video features and 2% for Kinect voice. In an effort to give a boost to its console, Microsoft is expected to issue a system patch that removes the requirement that games save that 8% for Kinect video.

Going from 90% to 100% really is a 11.11% boost.
Going from 90% to 98% is a 8.88% boost.

So the 8% video requirement is gone, I wonder if that takes out Skype in snapped mode?