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

A lot hangs on CES 2025. The show hasn’t mattered for the world of PCs and computing this much in many years. After the past year, the stakes have never been so high for the big three. Intel is in an extremely compromised position — will it win back trust? Will AMD be able to capitalize on the opportunity? Can anything stop Nvidia from taking over the world?

A week from now, we just may have some answers to those questions. Buckle up for what will most certainly be a wild week of announcements. The RTX 50-series GPUs is top of mind, but it may end up only being the tip of the iceberg.

What to expect from Intel at CES 2025
Intel
Intel is up first for CES 2025, hosting what it calls an “Intel-driven” keynote on Monday, January 6 at 8:30 a.m. PT. Intel says a live stream of the announcements will be hosted on its website. Intel is going first, but it looks like it might have the least exciting lineup of announcements this year. A lot of Intel’s big product launches are already behind us, so it looks like CES 2025 is an opportunity for Intel to round out its lineup.

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Let’s start with the product we know about — the Arc B570 graphics card. Intel already announced this GPU as part of its Arc Battlemage lineup, and said the $219 will be released on January 16. I have the card here, I’m testing it, but I suspect Intel will dedicate at least a bit of time to talking about the B570 during its keynote. It’ll also likely take a victory lap with the exceptional Arc B580 that launched a few weeks back.

Elsewhere, it looks like Intel is scaling up its mobile lineup and scaling down its desktop lineup. The desktop lineup is easy enough to tackle. Up to this point, we’ve only seen the main three options — that being the Core Ultra 5, 7, and 9 — from Intel’s Arrow Lake range. Intel quietly opened preorders for non-K models in China just this week, stating the CPUs will officially go on sale January 13.

Intel
The mobile side is a bit more nebulous. Right now, Intel only offers its Lunar Lake lineup of CPUs to laptops, which aren’t really built for high-end gaming machines. To that end, several leaks point to Intel launching Arrow Lake-H and -HX chips at CES 2025. Basically, we could get higher-end laptop CPUs with more cores, more power, and possibly higher clock speeds.

That’s not too surprising. With the big push for Copilot+ laptops now behind Intel, the company likely wants to focus on next-gen gaming laptops, which I’m sure we’ll see a ton of at CES 2025.

It doesn’t look like Intel will have a barn burner announcement this year, but that’s OK. Just last month, Intel announced the sudden departure of CEO Pat Gelsinger after months of financial turmoil. With so many shakeups in the company, it’s probably a good idea to play CES 2025 safe, and it looks like that’s exactly what Intel is doing.

What to expect from AMD at CES 2025
AMD
AMD is up next, hosting a keynote just minutes after Intel wraps up at 11 a.m. PT on January 6. In contrast to Intel, AMD might have the most stacked CES lineup out of the big three. One announcement will take center stage, though — RDNA 4 graphics cards. We’ve been hearing about AMD’s next-gen GPUs for a while now, and not just through leaks and rumors. AMD itself has reiterated that its next-gen graphics cards will launch in early 2025, and all signs point to them launching at CES.

AMD has said it doesn’t want to play “king of the hill” with Nvidia, and we have about a year of speculation that AMD will skip the flagship battle in favor of midrange and budget offerings. The first card up appears to be the RX 9070 XT, which has seen several performance leaks over the past few weeks.

Some claim the card is about as fast as an RTX 4080; others say it’s 5% slower. Even more say that it’s closer to an RX 7900 XT, while a leaked Time Spy result shows it performing about as fast as an RTX 4070 Ti. Basically, it’s all over the place. Still, it’s all but confirmed that AMD is targeting the upper midrange segment with its flagship release, forgoing a traditional high-end offering like the RX 7900 XTX that we had in the previous generation.

Here’s what I suspect to see — the RX 9070 XT, or whatever it ends up being called, will fall somewhere in between the performance of RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080, likely ending up around the performance of the RTX 4070 Ti Super. And it’ll cost between $600 and $650. That’s my prediction, so don’t take it as law. But that seems like a reasonable guess given what’s been rumored up to this point.

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
That will probably be the only GPU we get from AMD, as other cards in the RDNA 4 lineup are said to arrive some time in March. Alongside the announcement, I suspect we’ll at least hear something about the next version of FSR. Rumor has it that AMD will announce FSR 4, which is said to be based on AI, utilizing dedicated AI hardware on AMD GPUs for better image quality, similar to Nvidia’s DLSS. I won’t go as far as to say we’ll see FSR 4 in its entirety, but I expect to at least get a tease of what’s to come.

Believe it or not, that’s only one half of what AMD will likely announce. The company makes CPUs, remember? It’s only been a handful of months since AMD launched its Zen 5 desktop offerings, but there are still some slots in AMD’s lineup that are unoccupied. I’m talking about the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D.

We have the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but similar to the previous generation, AMD likely wants to expand its 3D V-Cache tech to its higher-end chips this generation. I’m not sure how many 3D V-Cache CPUs we’ll see, or if AMD will scale down to the Ryzen 5 range with them, but I expect to hear about at least one new 3D V-Cache chip at CES.

That’s not all, either. AMD has already revealed that its Ryzen Z2 handheld chip is coming soon, and it looks like we’ll see at least a couple of new handhelds at CES. As if desktop CPUs and graphics cards weren’t enough, AMD might also touch on the Z2 chip and what it’s capable of.

What to expect from Nvidia at CES 2025
Nvidia
Despite officially opening CES with its keynote, Nvidia is actually the last of the big three to host its keynote. It takes place on January 6, as well, but Nvidia is waiting until 6:30 p.m. PT to get its party started. I expect Nvidia to talk about a lot during its keynote, but for PC gamers, only one thing matters — RTX 50-series GPUs.

It’s an open secret at this point that Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards are coming at CES 2025. The specifics, on the other hand, are up in the air. It looks like we’ll see at least the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 at CES, but recent rumors say Nvidia will change up how they roll out. Instead of launching the RTX 5090, it looks like Nvidia will launch the RTX 5080 first.

Hong Kong media outlet HKEPC revealed just yesterday that the RTX 5080 would release on January 21, but it quickly deleted the tweet in which the release date was shared. That date might not be correct, but there’s a good chance we’ll get the first of Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs sometime in January. And if the recent speculation is accurate, that GPU will be the RTX 5080.

Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
No one is asking about what cards will show up at CES, though. They’re asking how expensive they’ll be. I don’t have a clear answer for you, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia completely skipped talking about pricing. As cards like the RTX 4080 Super showed, Nvidia is well aware of the criticism it’s faced around the pricing of its desktop graphics cards, so it could opt to skip mentioning the price altogether, especially if the price is bad news.

And rumor has it that the price will be bad news. Some suggest the RTX 5080 could cost as much as $1,600 — the same price of the RTX 4090 — while the RTX 5090 could crack $2,000. It’s hard to say, but I don’t suspect Nvidia will price a gaming graphics card above $2,000. If the RTX 5090 ends up being as expensive as rumors suggest, it’ll likely be angled more toward a prosumer market with a focus on AI training.

Beyond the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, it’s tough to say. Nvidia could announce some cards lower down the stack, but if they are revealed, they likely won’t come for a while. Similarly, we’ll probably hear some details about Nvidia’s RTX 50-series mobile lineup, though it’s hard to say what models from that range we’ll see.

The big question for me is DLSS. There haven’t been any rumors about DLSS 4, but Inno3D, one of Nvidia’s partners, teased “neural rendering capabilities” that it will show off with new graphics cards at CES this year. Nvidia launched DLSS 3 with the release of its RTX 40-series graphics cards, so it’s possible we’ll see DLSS 4 this time around.

Qualcomm, laptops, monitors, and more
LG
Intel, AMD, and Nvidia are the big newsmakers, but that’s far from the only computing announcements you should be on the lookout for. All the major laptop manufacturers are due to have refreshes to consumer, commercial, and gaming laptops — whether that’s Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Razer, or MSI — they’ll all make an appearance on the show floor with some new products. LG already announced its new Gram Pro laptops, and there’s even been a leak about a rollable laptop that looks pretty wild. If we do end up getting RTX 50-series mobile GPUs, we could see some long-awaited gaming laptop updates and refreshes — so keep your eye out for that.

Monitors are always a big part of the show, and we’ve already seen a number of big announcements launch ahead of CES. LG unveiled its 5K bendable OLED, while Samsung Display’s rollout of 4K 27-inch QD-OLEDs already launched too, with monitors from MSI, Asus, and Samsung already announced. Samsung even officially announced its 3D monitor too, which began as a prototype last year at CES.

And lastly, we need to mention Qualcomm. The big three, after all, is quickly becoming the big four. 2024 was a massive year from Qualcomm with its Snapdragon X chip. The rumor this year is that Qualcomm will continue its push into the Windows PC landscape, with potentially a wider ecosystem of products, including budget laptops and even desktop PCs. We don’t know if any of that will come to fruition at CES, but we’ll certainly hoping for more disruption in the Windows PC space from Qualcomm.