Microsoft has certainly been keen to impress at this year’s GDC, laying out its vision for Xbox‘s future during its Developer Summit keynote. While we’re still going to have to wait a while for Project Helix, judging from what’s been said, the Xbox team isn’t resting on its laurels. In fact, the first step towards the Helix era is set to arrive next month, as ‘Xbox Mode,’ a fully-realized and rebranded iteration of the Xbox Full Screen Experience, will begin rolling out on Windows 11 soon.
Xbox Mode is effectively a dedicated gaming layer that cuts down RAM-guzzling background tasks, while improving gaming performance and navigation for controllers. Think SteamOS, but Windows rather than Linux. We’ve already seen what the Full Screen Experience on last year’s Xbox Ally X, one of the best handeld gaming PCs out there, can do, so I’m quite excited to see what sort of uplift I’ll be able to get in some of the best PC games on my desktop and laptop. Microsoft has been progressively integrating PC gaming libraries into Xbox’s ecosystem, hence the appearance of your Steam arsenal in the Xbox app, but Xbox Mode will take it in a more meaningful direction.
As Xbox continues to work towards Project Helix, Xbox Mode should also be the first big indication of what its user interface could look like. Ed had his fair share of criticisms of the handheld version in his Xbox Ally X review, so hopefully a lot of those crinkles will be ironed out over time.
Regarding Project Helix itself, VP of Next Generation Jason Ronald has revealed that the PC-console hybrid will get into developers’ hands in 2027. Once again partnering up with AMD, Ronald says Microsoft’s everything machine will run on a custom SoC that “delivers an order of magnitude leap in ray tracing performance and capability, integrates intelligence directly into the graphics and compute pipeline, and drives meaningful gains in efficiency, scale, and visual ambition.” Basically, the games of tomorrow will look and feel even better.
Delving into the details on X, AMD graphics lead Jack Huynh says that the new version of AMD’s FSR upscaler, dubbed ‘Diamond,’ is “designed to be natively optimized for Project Helix and deeply integrated into the GDK.” The machine-learning-based tech is set to bring the same multi-frame generation tech you’ll find in modern GPUs into play. Though it’s a bit of a touchy subject among hardware enthusiasts, it should at the very least help Project Helix achieve higher framerates in more demanding titles.
With Xbox Mode finally spreading its roots across Windows 11 devices this April, as well as the confirmation that devs will finally be able to start working with Project Helix next year, it surely won’t be too long before we’ll be playing GTA 6 or whatever the current hotness is on the next-gen machine. It looks like that won’t be until 2028 at the earliest, but the wait could very well be worth it. As with all new hardware in the current PC gaming climate, pricing is going to be the big one we’ll all be keeping an ear out for, but as long as it’s less than a couple sticks of DDR5 at the minute, I probably can’t complain.
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