Xbox One's insides have been tweaked since E3

Microsoft said today that it has tweaked the insides of the upcoming Xbox One console since E3, in a bid to optimize the console in the run-up to launch. Speaking on Larry Hryb's latest podcast, Xbox One chief product officer Marc Whitten explained that the Xbox One's GPU clock speed has now been tweaked up from 800MHz to 853 MHz. Whitten adds that upping the GPU clock speed by 53MHz came as a result of the development of the console being a tad too conservative. What does this mean for developers? It's hard to say exactly, because GPU speed isn't the be-all end-all performance factor. But in theory, a higher clock speed could mean higher performance of Xbox One games. Elsewhere he says that the console, which has entered internal hardware beta, is now equipped with a "mono driver" -- essentially, a graphics driver that Whitten says is optimized for the Xbox One hardware. "You start with the base DirectX driver and you take out all the parts that don't look like Xbox One, and you add in everything that really, really optimizes that experience," he says. "Almost all of our content partners have picked it up now." You can listen to Whitten speak in more detail on the podcast -- this chat begins around the 22 minute mark.