While ongoing discussions about next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft have led to many reports and rumors, a new one, courtesy of industry insider KeplerL2, has indicated that Project Helix might use an off-the-shelf AMD GPU without any customizations. This would be a pretty major shift for Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, since console hardware tends to be heavily customized in order to allow unique performance and power draw targets to be hit.
In a post on the NeoGAF forums responding to the PS6’s Orion APU and Project Helix’s Magnus APU both being “customized silicon,” the leaker responded by saying that “[Microsoft] has 0 customization on the GPU side this time.” However, its GPU will continue to include a similar feature set to other AMD GPUs, including Neural Arrays, thanks to its RDNA 5 architecture.
Further in the post, another forum user asked KeplerL2 how Project Helix is able to make use of AMD’s FSR Diamond technology without Microsoft having made any customizations to its GPU. To this, the insider responded by noting that “‘FSR Diamond’ is just the codename for the FSR 5 family of upscaling/framegen/denoising transformer [machine learning] models built for RDNA 5. PSSR 3 will be the same thing with a different name.”
Interestingly, KeplerL2 has also revealed that the Project Helix GPU will be capable of around 3,000 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of AI performance, which will be purely dedicated to FSR 5 and neural rendering. The CPU will also have its own NPU (neural processing unit) capable of around 100 TOPS, which has been noted as being only for Microsoft’s Copilot software suite.
As for what this might mean for the Project Helix GPU on the whole, the fact that there is zero customization being done by Microsoft itself means that the graphics side of the Magnus APU is likely powered by one of AMD’s other GPUs. While the company sells plenty of hardware to consumers, it also has a variety of CPUs and GPUs that are only available for purchase by other companies. As such, there is an equal chance that we might see Project Helix coming equipped with an embedded version of one of AMD’s consumer-facing GPUs, or an entirely new one that we can’t simply buy the desktop equivalent of at a local store.
Project Helix will also mark the first time that Microsoft has opted for zero customization on the GPU, since every console released under the Xbox banner has featured heavy under-the-hood customizations to ensure that developers could get the most amount of horsepower from the machines without having to worry too much about things like thermal limitations and power draw.
In the same thread, KeplerL2 had also discussed reports of the PS6 being capable of 10 times the ray tracing performance over the PS5. They noted that, while an impressive number, it would largely apply to under-the-hood calculations that the console will be doing to generate frames. This means that, rather than a 30 FPS game being boosted to 300 FPS, it’s likelier that the performance boost instead applies to frame generation time. Using Assassin’s Creed Shadows as an example, compared to the PS5 being capable of 33.33 FPS thanks to the 5 milliseconds it takes to generate a frame, the PS6 would instead be able to bring it down to 1.35 milliseconds, boosting the frame rate to 103.3 FPS.
