Jason Ronald, vice president of next generation at Xbox, gave a talk at GDC Festival of Gaming, and he said dev kits for Project Helix will be out in 2027.
I’m going to describe the news here and give some impressions as well.
“Gaming has always been in Microsoft’s DNA,” Ronald said, noting that Microsoft Flight Simulator came out on DOS in 1982, three years before Windows launched. Now Microsoft’s Xbox is in its 25th year and the company is building immersive worlds.
“There’s just a huge opportunity,” he said. “There are over 5,000 developers making games for Xbox today.”
He said their games have made Xbox special for 25 years. The Xbox came out in 2001. The Xbox 360 came out in 2005. Xbox One debuted in 2013, and the Xbox Series X/S came out in 2020. Ronald recounted the innovations that came with each machine, like the Ethernet connection in the Xbox and the HD visuals and marketplace in the Xbox 360. Xbox Live was deeply integrated in the experience. The Xbox One had its Xbox One X with the mid-life console update, with a leap forward in backward compatibility. The Xbox X/S was the first for two consoles designed at once, one for high end and one for affordability.
He noted Xbox continues its alliance with AMD, a multi-year, multi-product arrangement. Ray tracing has been a holy grail of computer graphics and it started become real on the PC and then it got real support with the latest generation of consoles which created a large addressable audience.
Memory bandwidth was constrained and so it introduced SSD storage on the consoles and then brought the devices to the PC. Now the company is designing a family of silicon to work across handhelds, PCs, and consoles as one common platform for game devs.
Then he mentioned some details on Xbox’s next device, Project Helix. It will be powered by custom AMD system-on-chip designs, co-designed for the next generation of DirectX, next-gen raytracing performance and capabilities, GPU directed work graph execution and more.
It also has AMD FSR Next and Project Helix. It is built for next-gen neural rendering. It has next-gen ML upscaling, new ML multi frame generation, next-gen ray generation RT for path tracing.
It has deep texture compression, with neural texture compression and DirectStorage + Zstd. The team is looking at high memory chip prices and engineering ways to deal with it.
He noted the design of the software is not unlike ROG Xbox Ally, where it’s running a subset of Windows but you never know that you’re inside Windows. It’s fast, and Microsoft is going to update the software with constant innovation. It’s doing advanced shader delivery, but in a way that you won’t always have to wait for shaders compiling notices when you load a game.
“Our North Star is getting players into the game as fast as possible,” he said.
This Xbox Mode is coming to Windows 11 in April, so the Xbox Ally fast gaming experience will be available on your desktop. Developers will have a single work flow and development experience for Xbox and Windows as well as other platforms.
“A key part of this is Xbox Play Anywhere,” he said. So it starts with cross progression and unified entitlement so you can play the games you own anywhere.
Impressions
I can appreciate the thoughtfulness that is going into lowering developer costs by enabling them to deliver a unified development experience for multiple platforms and devices at the same time. Xbox Play Anywhere already supports more than 1,500 games. XPA players play 2.2 times more hours and purchase 2.1 times more games.
Ronald said Xbox is paying attention to Game Preservation as well, so generations of players can play the same game.
“We feel a deep responsibility to preserve the games of the past,” like putting HDR on a game that debuted before it existed, he said. Iconic games from the past will be played in ways they could not be played before.
Of course, it would be nicer to hear what this machine will do that no other machine in history has done, and how much of a performance advantage it will have over the Xbox Series X/S.
“Everything we do is designed for you” at its heart, he said.
He closed with a demo reel of past games, but with no really reveals into the future machine. Still, it was aimed at giving devs stoked for developing for the next generation. Later today, the company will talk about the future of DirectX.