What to expect from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel at CES 2025

There’s a lot at stake for CES 2025. This show has never been more important to the world of PCs and computing in years. After the past year, the stakes have never been higher for the Big Three. Intel is in a very precarious position, but can it regain trust? Can AMD take advantage of this opportunity? Will anything stop Nvidia from dominating the world?

A week from now, we might have some answers to these questions. It’s definitely going to be a week full of announcements, so be prepared. RTX 50-series GPUs are a top priority, but that may just be the tip of the iceberg.

What to expect from Intel at CES 2025

Intel will be among the first to attend CES 2025, hosting a so-called “Intel-led” keynote on Monday, January 6th at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time. Intel said a livestream of the announcement will be hosted on its website. Intel is ahead, but it looks like this year will be the least exciting announced lineup. CES 2025 is likely to be an opportunity for Intel to expand its lineup, as many of Intel’s big product announcements have already passed.

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Let’s start with the product we know: the Arc B570 graphics card. Intel has already announced this GPU as part of its Arc Battlemage lineup, saying it will be available on January 16th for $219. I have the card here and am testing it, but I think Intel is willing to at least spend some time talking. He talked about the B570 in his keynote speech. You might also want a victory lap on the exceptional Arc B580, which was launched a few weeks ago.

Elsewhere, Intel appears to be expanding its mobile lineup and shrinking its desktop lineup. The desktop lineup is easy to work with. So far, we’ve only looked at the three main options in Intel’s Arrow Lake series: Core Ultra 5, 7, and 9. Intel quietly started pre-orders for non-K models in China this week and said the CPUs would be officially released on January 13th.

The mobile side is a little more ambiguous. Currently, Intel only offers its Lunar Lake CPU lineup in laptops, but it’s not actually built for high-end gaming consoles. To that end, there are several leaks suggesting that Intel will launch Arrow Lake-H and -HX chips at CES 2025. Basically, you could potentially get a high-end laptop CPU with more cores, more power, and possibly higher clock speeds.

That’s not that surprising. With Copilot+ laptops currently being pushed by Intel, the company probably wants to focus on next-gen gaming laptops, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot of them at CES 2025.

It’s unlikely that Inter will make any barnburner announcements this year, and that’s okay. Just last month, Intel announced the sudden resignation of CEO Pat Gelsinger after months of financial turmoil. With so much change happening within the company, it’s probably best to play it safe at CES 2025, and Intel appears to be doing just that.

What to expect from AMD at CES 2025

AMD will be next, hosting a keynote just minutes after Intel closes at 11am Pacific Time on January 6th. In contrast to Intel, AMD may have the largest CES lineup of the big three. However, there is one announcement: the RDNA 4 graphics card. We’ve been hearing about AMD’s next-generation GPUs for a while now, and not just through leaks and rumors. AMD itself has reiterated that its next-generation graphics cards will launch in early 2025, and all signs point to them launching at CES.

AMD has said it has no intention of playing “king of the hill” with Nvidia, and there has been speculation for about a year that AMD might skip the flagship battle in favor of mid-range and lower-end products. It continues. The first card appears to be the RX 9070 XT, which has seen several performance leaks over the past few weeks.

Some claim this card is almost as fast as an RTX 4080. Some say it’s 5% slower. It’s further said to be closer to the RX 7900 XT, while leaked Time Spy results show it performing at roughly the same speeds as the RTX 4070 Ti. Basically, it’s everywhere. Still, it’s all but confirmed that AMD is abandoning traditional high-end products like the previous generation RX 7900 XTX and targeting the upper midrange segment with its flagship release.

The RX 9070 XT, or whatever it ends up being called, will likely sit somewhere between the performance of the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080, and end up around the performance of the RTX 4070 Ti Super. Prices range from $600 to $650. This is my prediction, so please don’t take it as law. But considering the rumors so far, it seems like a reasonable guess.

Other cards in the RDNA 4 lineup are said to arrive sometime in March, so this will likely be the only GPU available from AMD. I suspect that in parallel to this announcement, at least something will be announced about the next version of FSR. Rumor has it that AMD has announced FSR 4, which is said to be AI-based and, similar to Nvidia’s DLSS, utilizes dedicated AI hardware on AMD GPUs to improve image quality. I’m not saying we’ll know the whole story of FSR 4, but we’re hopeful that we can at least get a glimpse of what’s to come.

Believe it or not, this is only half of what AMD will announce. This company makes CPUs, remember? It’s only been a few months since AMD launched its Zen 5 desktop products, but how many empty slots are there still in AMD’s lineup? There are. We’re talking about Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D.

There’s the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and like the previous generation, AMD probably wants to extend the 3D V-Cache technology to this generation of high-end chips as well. We don’t know how many 3D V-cache CPUs we’ll see, or if AMD will scale them down to the Ryzen 5 series, but we’re confident we’ll hear about at least one new 3D V-cache chip at CES. I look forward to it.

That’s not all. AMD has already revealed that its Ryzen Z2 handheld chip is coming soon, so it looks like we’ll see at least some new handheld products at CES. As if desktop CPUs and graphics cards weren’t enough, AMD may also touch on the Z2 chip and its features.

What you can expect from Nvidia at CES 2025

Although CES officially opened with a keynote, Nvidia was actually the last of the three major companies to host one. It’s also happening on January 6th, but NVIDIA is waiting until 6:30 PM PT to start the party. We expect Nvidia to talk a lot during the keynote, but only one thing will matter to PC gamers: It’s an RTX 50 series GPU.

It’s an open secret for now that Nvidia’s next-generation graphics cards will be coming to CES 2025. However, details are unknown. We expect to see at least the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 at CES, but recent rumors suggest that Nvidia will change the way it rolls them out. Instead of launching the RTX 5090, it looks like Nvidia will launch the RTX 5080 first.

Hong Kong media HKEPC revealed yesterday that the RTX 5080 will be released on January 21st, but quickly deleted the tweet sharing the release date. While this date may not be accurate, there’s a good chance we’ll get the first of Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs sometime in January. And if recent speculation is correct, that GPU will be an RTX 5080.

However, no one knows what cards will appear at CES. They are asking how much it costs. I don’t have a clear answer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia skipped talking about pricing entirely. As cards like the RTX 4080 Super have shown, Nvidia is well aware of the criticism it faces over the pricing of its desktop graphics cards, so it doesn’t mention pricing at all, especially when prices are bad news. You may choose not to.

And there are rumors that the price could be bad news. Some have suggested that the RTX 5080 could cost as much as $1,600, the same as the RTX 4090, while the RTX 5090 could cost over $2,000. It’s hard to say, but I doubt Nvidia will cost more than $2,000 for a gaming graphics card. If the RTX 5090 is as expensive as rumored, it could be more geared toward the prosumer market with a focus on AI training.

It’s hard to say it beats the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. Nvidia may announce some cards lower down the stack, but even if they are released, they may not be available for a while. Similarly, more details will be revealed about Nvidia’s RTX 50 series mobile lineup, but it’s hard to say which models from that range will arrive.

The big question for me is DLSS. There were no rumors about DLSS 4, but one of Nvidia’s partners, Inno3D, hinted at “neural rendering capabilities” that will be shown alongside new graphics cards at CES this year. Nvidia announced DLSS 3 to coincide with the release of its RTX 40 series graphics cards, so DLSS 4 could be on the way.

Qualcomm, laptops, monitors, etc.

Intel, AMD, and Nvidia are the big newsmakers, but they’re not the only computing announcements to keep an eye on. All major laptop manufacturers, including Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Razer, and MSI, are planning to refresh their consumer, commercial, and gaming laptops, and all will be on display with several new products. I will appear at the venue. product. LG has already announced its new Gram Pro laptop, and there’s even a leak about a rollable laptop that looks pretty wild. If we finally get our hands on the RTX 50-series mobile GPUs, we might get a much-awaited update or refresh for our gaming laptops, so stay tuned.

Monitors are always a big part of the show, and we’ve already seen some big announcements come out ahead of CES. LG announced its 5K bendable OLED, Samsung Display’s 4K 27-inch QD-OLED rollout has already begun, and monitors from MSI, Asus, and Samsung have also already been announced. Samsung also officially unveiled its 3D monitor, which started as a prototype at last year’s CES.

And finally, we have to mention Qualcomm. After all, the Big 3 is fast becoming the Big 4. 2024 was a big year for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. Rumors this year are that Qualcomm may continue its push into the Windows PC market with a broader product ecosystem that includes low-cost laptops and desktop PCs. We don’t know if any of that will happen at CES, but we’re definitely looking forward to more disruption in the Windows PC space from Qualcomm.