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Xbox is promising a 'very premium console' with Project Helix, one that will even play PC games. What does this mean for the future of gaming? We analyze the announced specs, the potential 2027 release date, and what this high-end hardware could mean for both console and PC players.
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00:00Hello I'm Dave and I'm Jacob and we are today we're talking about consoles which is kind of
00:05weird for PC gamers to be talking about consoles but you know Project Helix and Project Amethyst
00:10have been announced so let's let's talk about them. Well yeah and are they consoles? I've stolen
00:15your bit that's what you were going to do a really cool line there which is are they consoles? I
00:19mean at least one of them sounds a bit more console-y but one of them is going to play
00:22PC
00:22games. We've got a future of next generation consoles at a time where people are wondering
00:33are there going to be any actual consoles coming through? Both Sony and Microsoft have announced
00:38new well potentially announced kind of announced suggested new hardware. They talked about projects
00:43yeah so they've got Project Helix and Project Amethyst. Project Amethyst Sony's one which was
00:48spoken about the end of last year so that one's you know they've been working on that for a while
00:52and we already know about that for a while. Then Project Helix which was discussed at GDC
00:58alongside some DirectX stuff. AMD have spoken about it they actually spoke about it a little bit
01:02before Microsoft. Some Windows stuff as well. And some Windows stuff which is all incredibly connected
01:06now and I guess that's the thing that we're looking at this is like what does this tell us
01:10about future PCs because I mean they're all AMD they're all using PC hardware. PC stuff and maybe even
01:17PC operating systems. So I mean that's the thing let's let's let's start with that what is Project
01:22Helix what do we know about Project Helix? Yeah so well we know it's AMD again that's no surprise I
01:26think there was like a couple years ago maybe it's a couple years ago maybe a year ago there was
01:29like
01:29a whole thing maybe it'd be ARM and stuff like this but anyway nothing came out. I think they came
01:33out
01:33quite quite quickly and said like we're working with AMD on next generation hardware so. Not surprising AMD has
01:38done these for years. It'll play your Xbox and PC games that's a quote. Ex-Xbox president Sarah Bond said
01:44it's a very premium console and very high-end. Yeah it's too late in the cycle to be affected by
01:49Sarah Bond no longer being there and Phil Spencer no longer being there. Yeah so we've now got Asha
01:53Sharma who's taken over like once was the head of AI. Was it head of AI? Well she's quite serious
02:00into AI. Is now taking over Xbox. So that's going to be that's kind of an interesting change. Hopefully
02:05not a hundred percent prescient of what's going to happen with Xbox. But like I say it's come in so
02:11late
02:11because so Dr. Lisa Su, AMD CEO already confirmed 2027 target for this and said that and Microsoft
02:18have confirmed that they're going to ship alpha hardware to devs in 2027. So and the chip I think
02:23Dr. Lisa Su said it was already progressing well I think the quote was. So basically it's all in
02:29place you know. So even the leadership change it is what it is. You can obviously you can sell it
02:35differently. You can market it differently from here. One of the things that they've confirmed that
02:38they're sort of aiming for with this is order of magnitude leap in ray tracing performance and
02:42capability. And I think we should like there's got to be some qualifiers in that as well because
02:46like I think they've gone out there and said that that's like order of magnitude which sounds
02:52like incredible but I think like realistically that's going to be over the Series X rather than
02:57like any current gen AMD hardware. Yeah. So like we know that like RDNA 4 has actually been
03:03really really solid. It's a big step up. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of very lagging a lot before
03:07very very close to sort of Nvidia's ray tracing performance now. But the Series X was designed
03:14created well before any of that ray tracing like hardware was in AMD's DNA essentially. See what I did
03:22there? Yeah. That's very nice. Nice. Very sleek. It was also co-designed for next gen Direct X which
03:28we'll get to because that obviously plays that is quite pivotal for what the next sort of wave of
03:33PC graphics looks like and while that shapes you know takes shape for multiple GPU vendors and FSR,
03:40FSR Next and then later noted as FSR Diamond. Jack Hyun from AMD tweeted about that and sort of outlined
03:47what FSR Diamond actually is. Obviously we're on FSR Redmond, Redstone sorry right now, Redmond,
03:53Microsoft, sorry. Yeah, Redstone right now, FSR 4, not FidelityFX Super Resolution anymore. It's just
04:02called FSR, another name change. Don't love that. But yeah, FSR Diamond built for next gen neural
04:07rendering, next gen ML based upscaling and FSR 4 and updated PSSR on PS5 Pro already have some degree of
04:14that. New ML based multi-frame generation so kind of aping Nvidia on there and next gen ray
04:20regeneration for RT and path tracing which again is something they've got now but again is something
04:26that Nvidia also has in terms of game and graphics cards and you can have on MD obviously. There's
04:30already quite a lot there that I think we'll see on PC. Yeah, I think the FSR Diamond stuff feels
04:37kind
04:38of weird considering like Redstone has still hasn't really had a full launch yet. Well, it kind of has,
04:45it's turned up in a few games and stuff but it's still not at all widespread and already we're now
04:51glossing over that and moving on to Diamond. Yeah, and there is also an ongoing I don't want to say
04:55controversy because that makes it sound maybe that people want FSR 4 to work on older graphics cards
05:03because they feel like it can because it does so but hasn't been officially released. But then they're
05:08pulling straight from the Nvidia playbook on that. Yeah, it's like multi-frame generation could work on
05:1340 series cards but they've chosen not to because it maybe doesn't work as well.
05:18But then it works on the PS5 Pro which is using RDNA 3, 4 bits of sort of bits of
05:25all of these. So yeah,
05:26anyways, let's speak about Sony a little bit before we kind of get into all the PC comparisons.
05:31I kind of want to go back a little bit to some of the bits that you've just spoken about
05:37there.
05:37I think I kind of want to I want to dial into the stuff that Sarah Bond was saying about
05:42it being a premium console and very high end. And a lot of people have taken that to mean,
05:49well, this is going to be PC level, like we're talking $1,000 plus pricing for that.
05:57Can Microsoft actually do that? Can they create a console and go, oh yeah, it's super high end,
06:03so this is our $1,000 thing. Like, does that feel like doable to you?
06:07I think they, I mean, they've had a split approach before. I don't think there's any,
06:13as far as I know, I don't know of anyone saying that there's going to be a split again here.
06:16But
06:16I mean, maybe. I mean, did everyone know that Series S was coming when the Series X was sort of
06:22rumored? I remember talking about the Series X a lot of the time, but it feels like the hazy days
06:25of,
06:26it was like COVID lockdowns and stuff. It was all bad times. Just try and forget that. I mean, look,
06:30we're PC gamer. I don't see the point in any of these consoles.
06:34I just wonder, like, the way they were, like, those quotes are being taken. Could premium,
06:42very high end, does that necessarily mean pricing? Is that trying to, like, lay the ground for,
06:50like, this is going to be crazy expensive? Or is it just like, we're going for something that is
06:55really performant? Like, we're going to really sort of, like, push the boat out on the power in this
06:59thing? Or... I guess Microsoft's not been afraid of doing something more expensive.
07:03Sort of example by, we've got right there, yeah, the ROG Xbox Ally X, which is a very high-end
07:09handheld. It's not a Steam Deck. Yeah, it's not a Steam Deck, but it's not that high-end in terms
07:16of
07:16handheld hardware. It's the same as... It's about the same as a lot of others, but it does cost a
07:21lot.
07:21But it also doesn't cost a lot more than other handhelds, which is the other thing. Like,
07:25a lot... Like, obviously, the Steam Deck is a super cheap, super affordable, because that's what
07:31Valve wanted to create. But also, this is made, marketed, designed, sold by ASUS. Like,
07:39Microsoft's Xbox involvement in the Xbox LAX feels relatively minimal beyond the Xbox mode
07:49on the version of Windows that's installed in it. So I can kind of see why that ends up being
07:54a,
07:54like, a thousand dollar thing, because it's not... There is no subsidization coming from within
08:01Microsoft. Yeah. But surely, you would expect there to be some of that with the next generation
08:06console. Otherwise, how do you compete? Because it does matter what Sony's doing. Yeah. And what Sony's
08:12doing, in some ways, sounds a lot like what Microsoft's doing. I mean, if we go through what
08:17Project Amethyst was announced, you know, again, AMD, no surprises there, they're rolling in a bunch
08:23of neural arrays, which is compute units grouped together working as a singular AI engine. We
08:29know before that they... I don't know why they had to make that about being an AI engine when
08:33they're just talking about sort of... It's a GPU. Neural arrays to do upscaling, denoising,
08:37radiance cores, RT core, ray traversal. Again, this is all sort of basically the exact same
08:42thing as... It's just different names for... Order of magnitude leap in ray tracing. Yeah. It's
08:45pretty much the same stuff. And universal compression, compressed data to reduce memory
08:49bandwidth and lower power consumption, higher storage.
08:52Yeah. Which again, another thing that we've seen a whole bunch of on PC. And yeah, machine
08:58learning upscaling. Again, it's that sort of, like I said before, the PSSR, FSR ties. It's
09:05all the same stuff, essentially. I mean, that's the thing. And like underlying hardware is likely
09:09to be practically the same. Just a few more compute units here or there. Like maybe some
09:16clock speed changes here and there. I can't see the underlying silicon being that different.
09:22And like, honestly, the software that's going to access that hardware is going to be doing
09:28essentially the same things. It's going to be doing like the direct storage type thing. It's going to
09:35They're doing it, but without DirectX because it's Microsoft. So you've got to do your own version.
09:41Yeah. I mean, like even when they were talking about the PlayStation, the PS5 Pro, when they're
09:44bringing in sort of the FSR 4 sort of aping version of that with ML, they even say in the
09:50quote when they said that, you know, the algorithm and neural network used in the new PSSR stem from
09:55our project Amethyst partnership with AMD. And through AMD's FSR 4 upscaling technology,
10:00PC gamers have already seen the benefits of our collaboration. And then with this updated version,
10:04we're delivering that essentially to PS5 Pro players. There's so many connections between
10:08all these things, which are basically just like if an AMD graphics card comes out at the
10:13end of next year, when we're sort of expecting these to show up, well, we can expect to see
10:18a whole lot of these features making it into our gaming PCs as well.
10:21Yeah. You think sort of like the RDNA 5, what would we like? We're thinking that's going to be like
10:25827 for RDNA 5. It'll have those elements in there.
10:31Yeah. Well, so it was also noted, it was previously noted in their roadmap as next-gen,
10:36but next-gen AI and ray tracing, which is again, it's the exact same quote from what
10:41Microsoft's saying, what Sony's saying. And yeah, Zen 6 should be ready at the end of this year.
10:46And I think we saw with the Series X and, you know, the PlayStation as well,
10:51they were RDNA 2 and Zen 2. Zen 2 had already been out for a bit, still current gen when
10:57those consoles came out, but it had already been out. And RDNA 2 hadn't yet come out and it was
11:01coming out around the same time as the consoles. And we're pretty much set up for the exact same
11:05thing to happen. Zen 6 will be out. We'll have that in CPUs for the desktop, and then we'll get
11:12RDNA 5 late 2027, which is pretty much bang on where you'd expect these consoles show up,
11:18seeing as AMD's already confirmed that the chip's progressing well and they're going to aim for that 2027
11:23launch. Will any of that change with the Rampocalypse? Like, obviously, we've still got issues
11:29down to memory capacity, whether that's on storage, system memory, graphics cards. We're still in the
11:39grips of that at the moment. We're still not hearing any noises from any of the manufacturers about
11:45like, have we hit the nadir of that? Like, are we coming out of it? There's a lot of people
11:52that are
11:53saying sort of like, ah, 27 is still going to be happening, 28 could be 30, 2030. So that would
11:58affect prices. I mean, when you're talking about a high-end console, I mean, if it's got a ton of
12:05GDDR7, it's going to cost a lot more. I mean, you know, Microsoft, AMD, Sony, these are companies that
12:09could probably afford to buy a bunch of stuff, get a bunch of allocation of this stuff. They've
12:15probably been talking about it with these people, these memory manufacturers for a very long time.
12:18The price is the price when it gets to making it.
12:20Yeah, absolutely. Like, the manufacturing bill of materials is going to be what it is,
12:23and like, there's only so much you can swallow. And still, like, if you're already talking about
12:28subsidizing making a loss-leading product, like, you don't want to suck down too much
12:34that cost yourself. Will it affect, like, those release plans? Like, we're talking about this being
12:40end of 2027 as a sort of, like, tentative release for, like, Helix. Have they said anything,
12:47any rumors about, like, when Amethyst would come?
12:50I'm sure there are some out there. There's always rumors about all these things.
12:54There's always rumors.
12:54There's always rumors.
12:54So, I mean, we're, you know, we're notably kind of skirting around what the actual rumors are for
12:58the hardware of these things. But it is like GDDR7 and, you know, 60-odd compute units. I mean,
13:03if you took a guess as to what a high-end console with an AMD chip would have in it,
13:07I think you'd probably land somewhere around that anyway. It definitely is not a good time
13:11to be launching any sort of hardware like that. So, yeah, it does feel like it probably will
13:15have an impact. But it'll have as much of an impact on AMD's plans on PC, too.
13:21We've been in a situation where the previous generation of consoles was all AMD-based.
13:26And, like, back then, I remember we were sort of like, oh, well, this could mean really,
13:31really positive things for AMD on PC. Maybe it has on the CPU side, but I don't think that's
13:36necessarily come from any of the gaming stuff. But, like, we haven't really seen
13:42any sort of benefits translating over to AMD from, like, in terms of the graphics cards and
13:48stuff. It hasn't really materially changed, like, AMD's place within PC gaming. Will there be any
13:55difference within this current generation if they're going to be more close to PC?
13:59I feel like the upcoming generation, I think, as with previous ones, to be honest, is,
14:06especially on the Xbox side, they are sort of just tracking DirectX developments anyway,
14:10which are kind of industry-wide and vendor-wide. You know, there's multiple vendors doing this.
14:15NVIDIA is also a beneficiary of this stuff. Yeah, of course.
14:17So I wonder if there's a certain degree of, yeah, I'm sure they are, but no more than the other
14:22people
14:22also doing it. Because, I mean, DirectX, as we kind of touched on, I mean, the Series X and S
14:27use direct
14:27storage and sort of the Xbox velocity architecture, and that was a thing. And now that's sort of rolled
14:32out to everyone. And they've already said that, you know, this one of their GDC announcements from
14:36Microsoft was they're going to do console-level GPU developer tools, IndirectX for Windows,
14:43shader exploration in PIX, which they're like frame analysis sort of software, dump files, live shader
14:48debugging, and they've called it the deepest GPU tooling collaboration with hardware vendors
14:53in Windows history. So all of that sort of makes you think, yeah, the next-gen console is definitely...
14:58It does help. I mean, AMD is working with Valve as well on all of these things. It's working on
15:03all
15:03the handheld things. Yeah, the Steam machine obviously is going to be, if it comes out, is going to be
15:08AMD-based. So there's that. But I guess we've also got, like, something that we haven't really
15:12touched on. You mentioned it briefly earlier, the idea that the Project Helix will run PC games.
15:18Yeah. And that side of things then just makes you wonder, well, so it's just a PC then? It's
15:29got PC hardware in there. It's going to be running, like, PC abstraction layers. It's going to be
15:35running PC games. Like, theoretically, like, presumably you'll be getting Steam on there.
15:41Yeah, this is what we sort of disagreed with. When it first got announced, I thought, well,
15:45running PC games, do they just mean Xbox PC as they call it now? And I thought, well,
15:49doesn't an Xbox Series X also run Xbox in that it's all the same and they've launched all the
15:54games on both. So it doesn't really matter what you say it is. I mean, it's all doing it. But
15:59you
16:00were pretty like, no, I think this is, you know, there is the openness. And, you know,
16:04I'm going back through the quotes that I had look, you know, they do say keeping the flexibility and
16:08openness of Windows. But this is, I mean, they're sort of talking about Xbox mode there.
16:13Yeah. But then that's, you know, it's all leading up to, yeah, very much.
16:17But that's the thing. But if it then becomes a PC, then that gives you more chance as a for
16:25AMD
16:25because, like, there's much more, there will be many more AMD PCs out there, presumably if this
16:32sells well. How do they navigate that being a PC in terms of an ecosystem, which has fundamentally
16:39always been about choice, upgradability, modability, all of that stuff? How does that,
16:45how does that then fit in? Does this Project Helix device that can run a skinned version of Windows,
16:54I guess? How do they lock that down to stop it just being a PC? Because surely they can't want
17:00that to be open in terms of, like, is that locked down at a BIOS level?
17:06Yeah. Or if they don't, is it a Binnie ITX case and using regular parts? But then it's
17:12connecting to a custom designed SoC. Yeah.
17:17So it is sort of locked down in the sense of, I mean, like, you know, based on what we
17:21already
17:21know of it, it's surely a locked down chip, custom chip from AMD. There's not like you're going to just
17:26be able to take the Ryzen bit out and pluck something in it. And it's all going to be unified,
17:31right? Yeah. Because they always are. So yeah, it is. But then can you just like take it out and
17:35put it into another mini ITX case that you want? Yeah. But then also, why would you buy that if
17:39it's the same price as an equivalent PC that you can just upgrade whenever you want? So could they
17:45just be making a really affordable gaming PC, which then becomes actually super accessible?
17:51The non-cynical take that you're touching on there is, yeah, what if it's just cheaper than a PC,
17:55but offering similar PC performance and similar PC benefits, like you can put Steam on there?
18:00You have to suck down the fact that it's a bit more locked down than a super open
18:05Windows PC would be. But you're getting the performance, you're getting the gaming
18:10chops in there, but for less cash. But then the flip side, and I guess this is sort of what
18:15you
18:15see with Valve and the Steam machine is you could make your own Steam machine because you could put
18:19SteamOS on anything. I mean, so they've announced Xbox mode now, which is used to be full screen
18:24experience, right? Which is a sort of slimline version of Windows where it's not running so
18:29much stuff because it doesn't need to. It's got this kind of like friendly UI. It's what you're
18:34basically running on that handheld right there. Can you not just put that on any PC then and turn
18:38it into an Xbox? I mean, if there is no dividing line between the two, yeah, you can just go
18:43for it.
18:44You can make anything an Xbox. No, they're not doing that anymore.
18:46Yeah. Everything isn't an Xbox anymore. An Xbox is a PC. Yeah. Well, your PC is an Xbox. It's all
18:53getting a bit confusing. It is. I think that's the thing. It's like, and I guess until it comes out,
18:57like it is going to be, it is going to be really confusing. What is AMD getting out of? What
19:02do we
19:02think? Like, I mean, they're running everything, right? Yeah. And they're also running everything
19:06in the living room. And so they've got a complete domination of all this. Whether Valve gets the Steam
19:16machine out and that's affordable, we hope. But you know, it doesn't matter to AMD. I mean,
19:21they're winning on all fronts here. So I mean, the one thing they're not winning in is actually
19:25gaming PCs. Everything else, they've got completely locked down. It's a clean sweep.
19:29So it's a win for AMD. Theoretically, it will be inevitably then a target for PC development as well.
19:37If it's the heart of the Xbox, which plays PC games, then it surely would be a target for PC
19:44development. I just feel like a target for PC development is DirectX. You know what I mean?
19:49I feel like that's really what the target is. And it's just something shared between all of the
19:54vendors, right? So I do wonder how much like explicit advantage...
19:59There has to be some driver level optimizations and whether those drivers can be shared across
20:06a Project Helix and an AMD gaming PC will be interesting to figure through.
20:13Yeah.
20:13Well, these are interesting times.
20:14Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, exactly. The definition of a console seems to be massively changing again.
20:21And the definition of a PC, I mean, we've been chatting about ARM and how that might change
20:26sort of what you define a PC as as well. And also about unified, you know, system memory and how
20:32maybe that would be an advantage to a PC. I mean, I think we were chatting about that
20:35last time we had one of these about how NVIDIA would see it, that if you had a unified memory
20:41and you could, it would be much more effective and efficient for running games on.
20:45Especially if you're putting more of that compute stuff onto AI, so you're...
20:49So what if NVIDIA's got their sort of DDX chip, essentially, that they're putting out,
20:55and that's sort of a little SOC, unified everything. And then you've got...
20:59Strix Halo.
21:00Yeah. Strix Halo and you've got AMD doing it with all the consoles.
21:02Apple doing it with all of their hardware as well.
21:05It's sort of going that way where you just have these massive hardware vendors. They're not consoles.
21:11They are PCs, but they're not a PC in the kind of upgradeable, flexible way
21:16that we would recognize them. And I don't know if I'm a bit terrified about that.
21:20I'm kind of weirded out about this. I think it's something that you were saying before about it.
21:24Like, what is this saying for what Microsoft wants to do in consoles?
21:30Like, are they happy to still be in consoles?
21:32I think the pessimistic take is not like, okay, they just want to make a really powerful console,
21:37and they just want to leverage all the benefits of Windows. It's sort of like they want to leverage
21:41all the benefits of Windows and make it so that Xbox PC is sort of like a big brand,
21:45so that they can kind of quietly exit consoles. That would be my pessimistic take on that.
21:49And then they don't have to make hardware anymore. Then it's just like, well, it's just you guys make the
21:53Xbox PCs.
21:54And you could make, Asus could make one, somebody else could make one,
21:56and then they're doing a steam machine thing, right? The original steam machine.
22:00Like, Valve's doing its own machine now, but I mean, their plan was always get some other people to make
22:04it,
22:04and then we'll just make everything else. And then it's our ecosystem, right?
22:07And Microsoft surely sees some of the writing on the wall there that that's not a bad idea.
22:12And we actually have a lot of leverage, and DirectX is a huge leverage, right?
22:15Even though it's Motivendo and they're doing it, you know, to the benefit of a lot of people.
22:19But it is huge leverage, especially over Sony. So yeah, I do think it's potentially the way
22:26we might see this all play out. But whether that's going to play out with the exact,
22:30explicitly with the next generation of consoles, or that's the direction of travel
22:33that we sort of end up, you know, landing on, especially if x86 sort of gets pushed out
22:40on the desktop by ARM, which has not happened yet. Laptops, it's happening,
22:44gaming, but gaming is still a real weak spot. So yeah, I think next 10 years or so,
22:51we'll see. My prediction, maybe we'll see something in 10 years along those lines.
22:56Wow. On that serious prophecy of technology from our Jacob there,
23:05it probably sounds like a good place to end it. So what's going on with consoles?
23:09Will there be consoles? In 10 years? We'll find out.
23:12Yes, exactly.
23:13Stay tuned.
23:13Perfect. Cool. All right. All right. Thanks.
23:15Bye.
23:15Cheers for watching.
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