Xbox Project Helix won't be in developers' hands until 2027

Microsoft said at the GDC Festival of Gaming that alpha development kits for Project Helix will be delivered to developers in 2027, a schedule that casts doubt on the company's reported ability to ship the next Xbox in late 2027. Jason Ronald, vice president of next generation at Xbox, outlined planned features and reaffirmed the device will play both Xbox console and Windows PC games.

He promised next-generation ray tracing performance powered by AMD's custom silicon, and a slide shown during the talk said Project Helix's implementation of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution will offer machine learning-powered upscaling, multi-frame generation, ray regeneration for ray tracing and path tracing, and deep texture compression.

Ray tracing on current consoles often comes with a performance cost, with many games offering it as an optional effect rather than aiming for optimal resolution or frame rate.

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