The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has officially kicked off this year in Las Vegas, and there was no shortage of announcements, which began pouring in furiously last night. There were no fewer than three major keynotes, with Nvidia, Intel, and AMD each taking the stage to share insights into what they're delivering for 2026 and beyond.
New Nvidia GPUs are a no-show, DLSS 4.5 is incoming, Rubin GPU set to accelerate the AI boom
Perhaps the biggest news for enthusiasts from Nvidia was that the company didn't announce any new GPUs. This time last year, Nvidia launched the RTX 50 Series of GPUs at CES, and there were initial rumors of a "Super" refresh. However, it wasn't meant to be: the company tweeted before its big CES keynote that "No new GPUs will be announced."
With the ongoing memory shortages and Nvidia's increasing focus on its highly profitable AI ambitions, it's not entirely shocking news. But it breaks Nvidia's five-year streak of announcing new GPUs at CES.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
However, it wasn't a total loss for gamers: Nvidia also introduced DLSS 4.5 along with Multi Frame Generation 6X. According to Nvidia, DLSS 4.5 is taking additional steps to improve temporal stability and reduce visible artifacts that can mar on-screen images (shimmering/flickering and trailing "ghosts" behind objects are common complaints), as well as anti-aliasing. Although Nvidia is extending support for DLSS 4.5 to its legacy RTX 20- and 30-series cards, the lack of Tensor Core FP8 acceleration leaves some uncertainties regarding performance.
Given the world's insatiable appetite for everything related to AI, Nvidia introduced its new Vera Rubin NVL72 AI supercomputer. It consists of six distinct chips: the Vera CPU, the Rubin GPU, the NVLink 6 switch, the ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, the BlueField-4 data processing unit, and the Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch. Together, you're looking at a single Rubin GPU delivering up to 50 PFLOPS of inference performance (NVFP4) and 35 PFLOPS of NVFP4 training performance fed by 288GB of HBM4 memory.
Intel Panther Lake is on the prowl
Intel announced 14 SKUs in the new Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) family. The new lineup also includes three SKUs with an "X" designation: the Core Ultra X7 358H, Core Ultra X7 368H, and Core Ultra X9 388H. These chips feature a beefier Arc B390 GPU with 12 Xe3 cores (up from 8 Xe2 cores on the most potent Core Ultra Series 2 chips), which should offer similar performance to a discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050.
(Image credit: Intel)
... continue reading