We’re starting the week with coverage of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The show officially begins today, but many big names in the industry have already started announcing new products aimed squarely at the gaming audience.
From Nvidia to Intel to AMD, there is plenty of hardware news to tickle your fancy. We even have some updates on the display standard side in the form of DisplayPort 2.1b and HDMI 2.2.
Nvidia announces GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, and 5070 based on “Blackwell”
Perhaps the biggest hardware news of the day came from Nvidia, which announced its latest family of GeForce graphics cards built on Blackwell architecture. The new graphics card family is heading to the desktop market, and Nvidia announced that the full slate is also on deck for gaming laptops.
All the new Blackwell chips are built on TSMC’s 4NP process node. Although Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn’t provide transistor counts for the lesser members of the family, he revealed that the GeForce RTX 5090 has a staggering 92 billion transistors. The flagship chip also has 32GB of 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory, 3,400 AI TOPS of performance, and 104.8 TFLOPS FP32 performance. The new GPUs are already in volume production and will be available later this month. The GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 will be priced at $1,999, $999, $749, and $549, respectively.
Intel Arrow Lake goes mobile, AMD’s family of 3D V-Cache chips expands
Intel is ready to fire its arrows at the laptop market with the Core Ultra 200HX and Core Ultra 200H processor families. Intel hopes to shore up its defenses against its perennial competitor, AMD, and a newcomer, Qualcomm. The Core Ultra 200HX processors will be featured in desktop replacement gaming laptops, headlined by the Core Ultra 9 285HX. The Core Ultra 200H family is destined for mainstream laptops, with the Core Ultra 9 258H sitting at the top of the totem pole.
There will also be a mix of other 200 series processors based on older architectures, including the Core 200H (non-Ultra), based on Raptor Lake; Core Ultra 200U, based on Meteor Lake; and Core Ultra 200S (a fork of desktop-based Arrow Lake processors).
While Intel’s gaming ambitions took a hit with Arrow Lake, AMD shows no signs of slowing down. It announced two new members to its X3D family: the Ryzen 9 9950X3D (16 cores, 332 threads and the Ryzen 9 9900X3D (12 cores, 24 threads). AMD claims that the former offers a 20 percent uplift in performance over Intel’s flagship Arrow Lake K-Series processor and comes within 1 percent of the famed Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Let’s hope that retail availability for the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is better than the notoriously hard-to-find Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
If thin-and-light notebooks are your area of focus, you might want to look at AMD’s “Strix Halo” Ryzen AI Max series processors. AMD’s point of reference for performance comparisons is with Intel’s Lunar Lake processors, and it says that its chips offer up to a 1.4x improvement in gaming performance.
The most potent member of the family is the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (16 cores, 32 threads) with an onboard Radeon 8060S GPU (RDNA 3.5).
And for folks that want the absolute best performance on a gaming laptop, look no further than the new HX3D “Fire Range” mobile processors. They bring the 3D V-Cache goodness from the desktop side to laptops. The new Zen 5-based chips, available during the first half of 2025, are led by the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D. It features 12 cores (32 threads) and throws in an extra 96MB of L3 cache to boost gaming performance and offers a maximum boost clock of 5.4 GHz.
Dell retires XPS, Inspiron, and Optiplex branding
Dell’s long-standing XPS, Inspiron, and Optiplex brands are getting the axe. Dell says this move will simplify its naming conventions for consumers, but we have our doubts about those claims. At first glance, this move seems similar to Apple’s laptop nomenclature.
In the future, Dell will use a three-tier system for its consumer PCs: Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. Each tier will then be subdivided into Base, Plus, and Premium. But it gets even more complicated, with 2-in-1 labels for convertibles and screen sizes thrown into the product name as well.
If there’s any consolation, the Alienware brand emerges unscathed from this naming revamp.
HDMI 2.2 and DisplayPort 2.1b standards announced
Although it might not be as sexy as a new graphics card or a brand-new laptop, new HDMI and DisplayPort standards were announced at CES. HDMI 2.2 increases the maximum bandwidth to 96 Gbps, necessitating Ultra96 HDMI cables. The standard supports high-bandwidth applications, supporting 4K at up to 480 Hz, 8K at up to 240 Hz, and even 10K at 120 Hz.
DisplayPort 2.1b now supports 80 Gbps transfers at distances of up to three meters using active “DP80LL” cables.
AMD teases its first RDNA 4 desktop graphics cards
Although AMD didn’t give us a full breakdown of specs and how they will compare to their Nvidia and Intel counterparts, the company did announce the upcoming availability of Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards.
These RDNA 4 GPUs will be built on a 4nm TSMC process node and promise to deliver improved ray tracing performance and optimized compute units. This time around, AMD won’t be gunning for the absolute highest tier of performance with its graphics cards. Instead, the Radeon RX 9700/9700 XT and Radeon 9600/9600 XT seemingly coincide with the GeForce RTX 4070/4070 Ti and RTX 4060/4060 Ti (and their eventual RTX 50 Series successors).
New laptops and everything else
Several new laptops were announced along with other odds and ends on the first (unofficial) day of CES.
