Early Xbox Project Helix specs promise "next-generation" AI upscaling and an "order of magnitude leap in ray tracing performance" as Microsoft tries to win the next-gen console war before it even starts

Microsoft took this year's Game Developers Conference as an opportunity to share some early Xbox Project Helix specs – and I do mean early. The list is light on specifics, but it does detail the types of technologies that'll power the next-gen machine, as Microsoft tries to get a leg up in the next-gen console war.

"As part of our multi-year partnership with AMD, we are shaping the future of rendering and simulation," Xbox's next-gen VP Jason Ronald says in a new blog. "Project Helix is powered by a custom AMD SoC" – that's a "system on a chip," for the laymen, which encompasses most of a modern game console's processing power – "and co-designed for the next generation of DirectX and FSR to unlock what comes next."

Here's how Microsoft outlines the broad strokes of the Project Helix specs, as detailed on a slide as part of a GDC talk attended by GamesRadar+:

• Plays your Xbox console & PC games
• Powered by custom AMD SOC
  • Codesigned for Next Generation of DirectX
  • Next Gen Raytracing Performance & Capabilities
  • GPU Directed Work Graph Execution
• AMD FSR Next + Project Helix
  • Built for Next Generation of Neural Rendering
  • Next Generation ML Upscaling
  • New ML Multi Frame Generation
  • Next Gen Ray Regeneration for RT and Path Tracing
• Deep Texture Compression
  • Neural Texture Compression
  • DirectStorage + Zstd

Talk of machine learning ("ML") upscaling – or AI upscaling, as most of us tend to call it – and ray tracing are pretty much what you'd expect from a new piece of graphics technology, though Ronald does promise "an order of magnitude leap in ray tracing performance and capability" with the new system. More interesting in my mind is the promise of using machine learning for texture compression, which Ronald went into more detail on in his GDC panel.

Roland explains these types of texture compression as, in part, a response to "the massive increases in storage prices and memory prices" we're now seeing. New types of compression technology would, in theory, make game install sizes smaller, freeing up space on your SSD. Similarly, the DirectStorage and Zstd combo would cut back on the amount of RAM games need in order to run efficiently – instead of loading game data into RAM, devs could instead run some of that data straight off the SSD.

"We're also leaning very heavily into Zstd, as well," Roland explains. "That is a capability that allows you to use the latest version of DirectStorage and be able to stream assets directly off of the storage drive, and be much more sensitive in how you're actually using memory, because you can actually stream it directly off of the SSD itself."

Roland also confirmed that Project Helix dev kits will roll out to developers in 2027, so hopefully it won't be too much longer before we actually see what the console can do. And, maybe, get some hard numbers on what it's capable of.

Project Helix "might be Microsoft's last attempt to make their hardware business work," analyst suggests: "There is nobody in this industry who believes there will be another Xbox if this next machine fails."