Destiny resolution to improve after Kinect is ditched

In a podcast with Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb (via OXM), Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirmed that Destiny was going to get a resolution increase thanks to Bungie's decision to drop Kinect functionality from the game.

During the interview, Spencer explained how the potential performance boosts that developers will be able to add to their games is down to using the reserves put aside for the Kinect:

"This was a point where we actually looked at the GPU reserve that we had set aside when we launched. And you always set aside these reserves not exactly knowing how people are going to use the reserves, and we've got more work to do to bring the reserve down as we get more efficient with stuff we're doing in the platform."

"This was a time when we wanted to give developers a choice on how much of the reserve, the Kinect reserve, they wanted to leave in the system," Spencer added. "If they know how they're going to use Kinect, or if they're going to not use Kinect in their game, we wanted them to have the option at a game side to decide how much of that reserve will wait - will remain."

Spencer then dispelled the notion that players will have to unplug their Kinect in order to see the benefit of the performance boost.

"It has nothing to do with Kinect being plugged in, in fact everyone should leave Kinect plugged in, because as soon as the game isn't running anymore, you quit the game, you go back to the dash, you are going to have all the great Kinect functionality that you ever had, and you can boot a Kinect game and the Kinect will continue to work - it'll have no impact on the game that decides off the back end that it's going to lower the reserve that's set in."

During the conversation Spencer said that Bungie are "going to pick up the June SDK update for Destiny, and they're going to up the resolution of Destiny based on this change. So I think it's just a great time for us."

It was then confirmed that Insomniac are also "going to use the increased capability that lowering the reserve will have to actually make a more vibrant and alive gameplay space."