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Microsoft has announced that the Xbox One GPU will now be clocked at 853MHz, up from the 800MHz originally announced when the console was officially launched.

The increased speed should yield a 6.6% increase in GPU performance, at least on paper, closing the gap on the PS4's superior hardware specs. The Xbox One's GPU shader throughput is now closer to 1.33 TeraFLOPS/s, but still someways away from the PS4's estimated 1.84 TeraFLOPS/s.

The updated specs was revealed by the Xbox One's chief product officer Marc Whitten in a podcast hosted by Xbox Live's Major Nelson. 

"This is the time when we've gone from the theory of how the hardware works - what we think the yield is going to look like, what is the thermal envelope, how do things come together - to actually having it in our hands ... an example of that is we've tweaked up the clock speed on our GPU, from 800 MHz to 853 MHz. Just an example of how you really start landing the program as you get closer to launch," Whitten said in the podcast.

While the performance differences might suggest that multi-platform games on the PS4 games may look better, the reality is that the "lowest common denominator" approach to game development will see PS4's visual qualities pegged down closer to the Xbox One's. Only PS4 exclusives might take advantage of the superior hardware, and probably only towards the end of the console's cycle as developers become better acquainted with the limitations of the cosole.

In related news, Microsoft Game Studios vice president Phil Spencer confirmed that, while the Xbox One would be a HDMI only device, game footage captures will still work the same way it does on the Xbox 360's HDMI output. This means gaming footage will not be copy protected to allow for recording. The Xbox One software will also have a built-in mechanism to record up to 5 minutes of gaming footage directly to the console's hard-drive.