NVIDIA, AMD and Intel aim for maximum power at CES 2025

There was no doubt that NVIDIA's RTX 5000 GPUs would be one of the biggest stories at CES 2025, and I thought Intel and AMD would arrive with their own new hardware. But I didn't expect each of these companies, in their own way, to put the pedal to the metal when it comes to the power of their chip designs. After all, we've spent the last few years covering ai PC CPUs that aimed for efficiency rather than raw performance.

While the NVIDIA RTX 5000 GPUs appear to offer the performance jump we've been hoping for over their 2022-era cards, AMD is also redefining what's possible for mobile workstations with its Ryzen ai Max chips, which combine powerful graphics with large amount of integrated memory. Intel is not standing still either: it is finally moving Arrow Lake into the realm of gaming and high performance with its Core Ultra 200HX chips, which can reach up to 24 cores and speeds of 5.5 GHz.

I'm also not just talking about power in the pure sense of performance. NVIDIA's $1,999 RTX 5090 requires a 1,000-watt power supply to operate and uses up to 575 watts. Meanwhile, the Ryzen ai Max chips could consume up to 120 watts. The Intel Core Ultra 200HX chips reach up to 120 watts. Clearly, none of this hardware is intended for people concerned about their energy bills or the potential battery life of their laptop.

So what do you get for all this energy consumption? AMD says the RTX 5090 will offer about twice the performance of its previous flagship, the $1,499 RTX 4090. Cyberpunk 2077 In the full ray-traced demo, the 4090 hovered around 108 fps while the 5090 hit 240 fps. That frame count is a bit controversial, however, as the RTX 5090's DLSS 4 ai upscaling outputs three frames for every natively rendered frame. The final result may look smoother to most people, but some players may question the integrity of the so-called fake frames.

It's those same ai-generated frames that allow NVIDIA to claim that the $549 RTX 5070 could be as powerful as the 4090. That may be true when it comes to pure frame-per-second count, but it certainly won't be true for rasterized. Performance without DLSS 4.

AMD's Ryzen ai Max chips don't aim for the same kind of graphical heights as NVIDIA's new GPUs, but they still stand out for the sheer amount of hardware they pack. The top-of-the-line Ryzen ai Max+ 395 has 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, 50 TOPS of ai performance, and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units. According to AMD, it should be part of Apple's 14-core M4 Pro chip (and even faster on the Vray benchmark), and it's 2.6 times faster in 3D rendering than Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V.

In an interview with Joe Macri, executive vice president and chief product technology officer at AMD, he told Engadget that the success of Apple Silicon is one of the main reasons Ryzen ai Max exists. “What Apple proved is that consumers don't care what's inside the box,” he said. Macri later noted: “I always knew, because we were building APUs and I had been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build a system that was smaller, faster and could deliver much higher performance at the same time.” force.”

AMD also briefly showed off its RDNA 4 graphics at CES, although at this point it's clearly aiming for the mid-range and not NVIDIA's RTX 5090. In particular, AMD will debut a new ai-powered upscaling technology on RDNA 4 GPUs, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4). That should finally give AMD a way to compete directly against NVIDA's DLSS, which for years has looked better than previous versions of FSR. The first RDNA 4 cards, the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, will arrive sometime in the first quarter.

Intel's presence at CES 2024 was more low-key than the competition, but loyalists will likely appreciate the new Core Ultra 200HX chips. While they reduce the NPU performance of their recent ai PC hardware (12 TOPS less than 48 TOPS), the Core Ultra 9 285HX looks like a 24-core beast. It will be interesting to see how it competes with AMD's Ryzen ai 300 hardware, although it probably won't stand a chance against the Ryzen ai Max when paired with a discrete GPU.