The next Xbox, Project Helix, is likely at least a year away

Ronald also gave lots of other tech jargon details about Project Helix. It will have a custom AMD chip with “an order of magnitude increase in raytracing performance” (raytracing is a lighting technique) and will have a new version of AMD’s FSR upscaling tech. Upscalers like FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS have become a cornerstone of modern gaming, using software to significantly boost in-game framerates (unfortunately, usually through generative AI).

As for the general direction of Project Helix, Microsoft is touting the system’s ability to play PC games. In recent years, the company has continued to push for its first-party games to release day-and-date on Windows, which is great for people with gaming PCs who don’t want to buy an Xbox (but probably not great for the Xbox division’s finances). This porting process will apparently start going in the other direction as well. Microsoft wants to make it so developers can write code once to run on both Windows PCs and the Project Helix. This would lower the barrier for studios to port it to both, even if the new Xbox somehow sells worse than its predecessor.

Microsoft’s Xbox division has been struggling in recent years, with the Xbox Series X/S moving only 28.3 million units as of June 30, 2024, which was less than half of the PS5 at the time. The company has also come under justified scrutiny for selling technology to the Israeli military, which was used to spy on and strike civilian targets in Gaza and the West Bank. The BDS boycott against Xbox and other Microsoft products is still ongoing.

In February, several of the biggest names at Microsoft’s gaming division resigned, including CEO Phil Spencer and Xbox president Sarah Bond. Asha Sharma, the former president of the company’s CoreAI initiative, took over Spencer’s gig, causing concerns that AI slop was in the pipeline for Xbox. It’s also probably fair to guess that AI-bubble-led hardware shortages will make the Project Helix pretty pricey. Regardless, we’re still a ways out from discovering if Microsoft’s wobbly Xbox business will improve with the tenth generation of consoles.