by We are just a few weeks away from the biggest technology festival of the year, the Consumer Electronics Show or CES. 130,000 attendees and 3,500 vendors are expected to descend on the sprawling complex of exhibition centers and show floors in Las Vegas for the event, which opens Jan. 9.
Among them will be our own Jacob, fighting the hordes to bring you the best PC gaming technology on the show. But what exactly will you find at CES 2024?
All AI, all at once
Hi, friend. I heard you like AI. So we took some AI and made it intelligent and artificial and then ran it through a big language model. Probably. Basically, if you don’t like AI, stay away from CES 2024. It will be everywhere. Actually, that’s Intel’s marketing slogan that will be trashed at CES, literally “AI Everywhere.”
The rest of the tech giants will almost certainly have an AI message to sell as well. How much all of this translates into tangible products and real-world benefits remains to be seen, especially for PC gaming.
Nvidia super sizes
Of the big noises in PC tech, Nvidia will likely be the only one to release something genuinely new in the form of “Super” branded upgrades to its existing line of RTX 40 series gaming graphics cards.
We have put an end to the rumors, but we expect an RTX 4070 Super, an RTX 4070 Ti Super and an RTX 4080 Super. Of those three, it’s the RTX 4070 Ti Super that promises to be the biggest step forward. This is because it is rumored to make the jump from Nvidia’s AD104 chip to the larger AD103 GPU, the latter currently used by the RTX 4080.
The RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4080 Super are believed to be smaller upgrades that use the same silicon as the existing non-Super GPUs. Perhaps just as important is the question of what will happen to existing GPUs. Will they disappear? Or could they get a price cut?
Either way, what you won’t see are Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GPUs, likely branded RTX 50-s Series. They won’t appear until at least late 2024 and maybe not until early 20225.
As a final note, could Nvidia start talking about its rumored ARM CPU for PCs at CES? 2024 is the year we expect to see some major movement in high-performance ARM chips for PCs, so it’s almost possible.
The profound impact of Intel Meteor Lake
You’ve already seen the teasers, but at CES we should see a slew of Meteor Lake-based laptops, all touting Intel’s new chip. The first previews of the new chip are a bit disappointing. But perhaps Intel can make a bigger impact with Meteor Lake and the new Core Ultra series of laptop CPUs at CES.
More broadly, Intel will expand Meteor Lake’s AI capabilities under its “AI Everywhere” banner during CEO Pat Gelisgner’s keynote at CES. Will we see some cool new applications to take advantage of NPU on Meteor Lake? Maybe, but more likely there will be some slightly meh tech demos running something like local AI imaging on the NPU and then a load of positive but vague sentiments about the transformative power of AI.
All AMD FSR, all at once?
Sorry to repeat the joke, but AMD has already announced that its FSR 3 enhancement technology will be open source, making it easy for anyone to add support, including community-based modders. One could argue that what FSR really needs is more polish and work from AMD itself, not one more load of games with slightly clunky scaling support.
Speaking of more polish, AMD has been announcing more games with FSR 3 support and the addition of variable refresh support for its fluid motion frame generation technology within FSR 3. So, there’s more internal work going on as well. Expect to see AMD develop more improvements to FSR 3 at CES.
AMD will also be making an AI launch, courtesy of its new Hawk Point laptop chip, which is really just the excellent Phoenix chip already used in everything from laptops to portable gaming devices. It’s probably okay, because it’s a great chip. Anyway, it’s branded Ryzen 8000 series, which is a bit misleading, but it contains the same AI-accelerated NPU as the existing Ryzen 7000 laptop APUs, allowing AMD to make that important AI launch at CES.
Finally, there’s a small chance that AMD will release an updated version of its N31 GPU, as seen in the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX graphics cards, to address Nvidia’s Super Series graphics. If so, it will be the same silicon running a little faster, not something really new.
Qualcomm’s new killer CPU
We don’t expect to be able to buy a laptop with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPU until June. But Qualcomm is likely to show some devices running the chip at CES.
Snapdragon X Elite appears to have competitive processing power compared to the best x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD, but could offer much better efficiency. Think of it as bringing something like the performance-efficiency balance of Apple’s M-series chips to the PC and you’ll have roughly the right idea.
With Nvidia and possibly AMD also expected to bring Arm-powered CPUs to the PC over the next year, the long-awaited PC transition from x86 to Arm could be here and CES 2024 could be a key scoring point. the way.
Olé, olé, OLED
Expect to see plenty of new OLED gaming monitors at CES. A key new segment will be the 32-inch 4K models that will use OLED panels from LG and Samsung. However, with the news that TCL is also starting production of its own OLED panels for monitors, it will be interesting to see if there are any new final monitor products in the 32-inch 4K space based on the new inkjet printed OLED technology. low cost ink from TCL. are shown at CES.
We also expect to see many new gaming laptops with OLED display technology from many of the big brands.
TeeVee technology
CES also introduces a mountain of new TV technologies and model ranges. To us, they’re mostly interesting because the panel technology seen in these new TVs often finds its way into PC monitors sooner or later.
Hopefully, CES 2024 will see advancements in OLED panels in terms of full-screen brightness. We’d also love to see some new, lower-cost displays that use microLED technology, but that’s probably still years away.
PCIe 5 SSD with cooler running
As we reported, Phison has a new fanless PCIe Gen 5 controller for SSDs. It’s not as fast in terms of peak performance as its existing driver, the hot and hungry E26, but more importantly it can run without the need for active cooling. CES should see numerous units debut with the new chip.
Silicon Motion has its own new PCIe 5 SSD controller in the works and it is claimed to be at least 30% more power efficient than the Phison E26 while offering essentially the same bandwidth. It’s unclear if the Silicon Motion controller needs active cooling for maximum performance, but we may find out at CES.
Strange and extravagant prototypes
Of course, it wouldn’t be CES without some weird and wacky prototypes. In 2008, Alienware wowed the world with a prototype curved PC monitor with an ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio. Can you imagine something like this?
It actually used DLP rear projection back then, so it was really strange, even by today’s standards. But it certainly provided a glimpse of the future. Just like the portable gaming PC that Alienware showed off at CES 2020. It looks similar to the recent batch of AMD-powered laptops, including the Asus RoG Ally.
A triple-screen Razer laptop was introduced in 2017, while more prosaic concepts include new case and motherboard form factors, and new cooling technologies. Last year was all about foldable displays, so it will be interesting to see what themes emerge at the 2024 show. How about a laptop that can successfully sleep without draining its battery or crashing? Now that would be a technical marvel!
Oh, and while you wait for this year’s show, why not peruse our preview from last year to see how much we got right…
