Custom AMD Chip and Advanced FSR Version — Details on the New Xbox at GDC
Microsoft held a presentation at the Game Developers Conference 2026. Their vice president of gaming devices development, Jason Ronald, talked about where Xbox might be headed and unpacked parts of Project Helix — Microsoft’s next console. Highlights and oddities follow:
- Ronald said the new box will run games on both console and PC and will be driven by a custom AMD chip. He quoted a "multiple increase in ray tracing performance" — RT/GPU gains, apparently — and confirmed path tracing support as well. The silicon is being built with the next-gen DirectX in mind, so expect changes at the API/GPU level rather than just higher clock speeds.
- Project Helix will ship with a beefed-up version of AMD’s FSR upscaler that leans on ML and includes frame generation to "fill in" intermediate frames for a smoother image. AMD’s senior VP Jack Huynh later named the update FSR Diamond, and said it’s tuned for Project Helix and tied into the devkits. See the clarification here. (Sony, for what it’s worth, has already pushed an improved upscaler for the PS5 Pro.)
- The launch timetable remains fuzzy. "Alpha versions" of Project Helix are due to go out to studios in 2027, per Microsoft. Insiders — KeplerL2 among them — still peg Project Helix, PS6 and Sony’s portable for the 2027 holiday window, so take the official cadence and the rumor mill together rather than separately.
- Convergence will begin sooner: Ronald said an “Xbox mode,” already on Xbox Ally hardware, is coming to Windows 11 in April in select regions. “We are bringing everything that’s best about Xbox to PC so Windows becomes a great operating system for gaming,” he said. One practical change: Advanced Shader Delivery will be more widely used so shaders are precompiled and shipped with a game/update instead of stuttering in the first run — a small QoL move if it works as promised.
- Microsoft wants a single build for PC and console — devs should be able to ship one build instead of two. According to Ronald, most of the code that runs on Xbox will be the same on other platforms, and he hinted a single purchase might cover both PC and Project Helix versions. In short: tighter parity, one SKU for users, fewer separate branches for devs.
- For Xbox’s 25th anniversary, Microsoft’s game-preservation team will show “new ways to play” older titles. Ronald suggested some of the company’s iconic franchises will make a return this year — nostalgia as strategy, with preservation and re-releases in the mix.