Hey guys
Lots of interesting comments on the GPU upgrade.
Let me put this out there. I know there is doubt about the truth of what we say, so some of you will believe me, and others wont. But here goes
We set aggressive targets for reliability, performance, yields, and noise. Those things always have to be balanced. We want this box to have rock-solid reliability. 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.
What weve 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 its only 6% or so, but that could translate to a few FPS in the real world.
I know there are many conspiracy theories out there about how and why we make decisions. I can tell you this was something we were hoping to be able to do for a while. So we were prepared for this. Nobody should worry this puts us at any risk or people are scrambling at this decision.