CES 2023 happened while I was spending my statutory holiday entitlement in the Welsh countryside, so these highlights of the Vegas tech show’s PC gaming gear announcements may be as surprising to me as they are to you. Unless you read Katharine’s review of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which I did after finding a smidgeon of 4G signal. Thank you, sir.
CES (Consumer Electronics Show) has always been a festival of the daring, the strange, and the dubiously useful – it’s the kind of place where a man will stand up with a straight face and announce he’s disrupted the Mouli grater. Rollerskates for walking, smartwatches that aren’t watches, and a chopping board that places an attachable screen dangerously close to the tips of your knives are among the wares on display at CES 2023. Gaming hardware, on the other hand, represented the more sensible side of the show, with no-nonsense AMD and Intel CPUs debuting alongside the most affordable RTX 40 series graphics card yet.
On the other hand, there were some massive monitors and a HyperX 3D printing initiative that could, if you’re so inclined, replace all of the keys on your gaming keyboard with miniature ducks. Typical CES moves. Here are my show recommendations:
Nvidia used CES to launch the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti desktop GPU, with the least amount of surprise a human body can produce. Following last year’s RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, this is the third RTX 40 series card to hit the market, and (as expected) is a rebrand of the weaker 12GB RTX 4080 variant that Nvidia cancelled shortly after revealing it. The price has been reduced from £949 / $899 to £799 / $799, with specifications such as the 12GB GDDR6X memory and 2.61GHz boost clock speed remaining unchanged.
I’ve been grumpy about the RTX 4070 Ti’s bigger brothers, mainly because, while they do offer significant improvements over the RTX 30 series, they’re priced as if Nvidia suddenly decided to become an aspirational tech brand where exclusivity is the point. The RTX 4070 Ti isn’t cheap, but it’s more in line with previous generations’ higher-end pricing, and if Nvidia isn’t exaggerating when they say it can outperform the RTX 3090 Ti, it has the best chance of the current range to be a GPU worth buying. It’s now available, and I’ll have a review up next week.
RTX 40 series laptops are also on the way, with a variety of GPUs that complements the trio of desktop offerings. Nvidia announced mobile graphics chips with the RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4070, RTX 4060, and RTX 4050 titles, a significant increase in scope given the RTX 4060 and RTX 4050 desktop versions have yet to be announced. Laptops with these chips, which use the same Ada Lovelace architecture as desktop models, will be available beginning February 8th.
At CES 2023, AMD announced a slew of new products. The highlight of the desktop lineup was a new three-piece Ryzen 7000 processor family with a similar 3D V-cache design to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D, Ryzen 9 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which will be available in February, aim to boost gaming performance with significantly larger L3 cache reserves. On the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, boost clock speeds range from 5GHz to 5.7GHz, with up to 16 cores and 32 threads. This cache engorgement process worked well for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, allowing more data to be stashed inside the CPU itself, speeding up overall processing time, so I have high hopes for these new chips as well.
Three new’standard’ Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs were also revealed: the Ryzen 9 7900, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 5 7600. These have lower clock speeds than the X-suffixed counterparts that were released last year, but all three have lower prices and 65W TDP ratings.
AMD announced 18 new mobile Ryzen 7000 CPUs, giving laptops some love as well. When it comes to gaming laptops, the Ryzen 7000 HX line offers the best performance, ranging from the six-core/5GHz Ryzen 5 7645HX to the 16-core/5.4GHz Ryzen 9 7945HX. Expect to see these in laptops starting in February, likely alongside the Radeon RX 7000 mobile GPU series. Yes, AMD confirmed this at CES.
The RX 7600M XT, RX 7600M, RX 7700S, and RX 7600MS all have 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and appear to be best suited for 1080p resolutions. The teasing of Smart Shift RSR, a new take on Radeon Super Resolution upscaling that “intelligently distributes rendering, upscaling, and presentation demands” between the CPU and GPU to further enhance performance, was the more intriguing aspect of this announcement. This will only be available on AMD Advantage branded laptops, which have both an AMD CPU and a GPU.
HyperX made one of the more surprising CES 2023 announcements, in addition to wired and wireless versions of the Pulsefire Haste 2, a successor to one of the best lightweight gaming mice. HX3D is a service/storefront that will launch later this month and sell 3D-printed accessories for compatible PC peripherals.
Keycaps will be a major focus, with small rubber ducks and a scarf-snuggled cat among the first items to be revealed. They appear to be well-made, having been spun from high-end printers by HyperX parent company HP, and should clip onto most mechanical ‘boards, even if they aren’t HyperX models. Other accessories, such as what appears to be a microphone mount of writhing Kraken tentacles, may be exclusive to the brand.
“HyperX will collaborate with game developers, esports teams, content creators, influencers, and internal creative teams to create and design fan-friendly products that can be used while gaming or collected as keepsakes or cherished collectibles,” according to the press release. I’ll admit that this isn’t my thing – I like my keycaps to feel like keycaps, not the plasticky hat of a figurine – but there is some good craftsmanship here.
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