CES 2025: AI and Gaming Innovations Take Center Stage

The Best of CES 2025

Well, that was a blast. Several of our illustrious hardware team were on the ground at CES 2025 in Las Vegas this year, and now the jet lag has abated and the dust has settled it's time to round up all of the winners of our Best of CES 2025 awards for your perusal. CES is always fertile ground for gaming laptop releases, and this year we weren't disappointed. But 2025 was something of a special show, as we also got to see the wraps taken off Nvidia's next-generation 50-series graphics cards -- and they were a sight for sore eyes after months (nay, years) of speculation and rumour. AI was still everywhere, as you might expect, but we carved our way through the crowds to find the implementations worth talking about. We also saw some impressive-looking CPUs from AMD (and a brief glimpse of the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, however fleeting), alongside some interesting gaming chair concepts, the odd clever case design, and even some handhelds worth talking about. A pretty successful show in general then, and a good opportunity for us to get hands on with the very latest tech. We've narrowed down our awards to nine categories, and each recipient of our coveted trophy is well deserved. Roll on 2025 then, as it seems there's plenty of exciting hardware coming our way. Razer Blade 16 (2025) CES has long been a showcase for the latest laptop releases, and this year was no exception. But out of every gaming laptop we cast our eyes upon, it was the Razer Blade 16 2025 that really stood out. Not only is it a slimmer-looking, edgier-feeling machine, but it keeps the fantastic OLED panel from last years model while updating the hardware inside to include AMD's Strix Point chips in the CPU socket (all the way up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370) and RTX 50-series mobile GPUs. Razer also says it will be "aggressively priced", although what that translates to in practice remains to be seen. Still, it's a truly desirable object to hold in your hands, and one we can't wait to test out when it releases in Q1 of this year. Razer Project Arielle We've seen gaming chairs with fans integrated into them before, but Razer came sweeping in this year with a mesh chair design that makes the whole concept feel seamless. Not only can Project Arielle deliver a steady stream of cool air down your back in a way that feels soothing, not irritating, but it can even provide a subtle yet comforting blast of heat for those chilly winter mornings. Personally I was expecting it to be a bit gimmicky, but having tested it myself it was a delightful effect. It remains a concept for now, but I reckon it won't be long before we see something like this available for sale. Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition CES 2025 featured a rare event this year -- a fully fledged Nvidia graphics card launch, unveiling the RTX 50-series GPUs to the world. While a smorgasbord of cards were unveiled (including the rather promising-looking RTX 5070 touting RTX 4090 levels of performance for a mere $549), we'd be remiss if we didn't give this award to the new top-end card for this generation, the RTX 5090. Not only does it feature an astonishing 21,760 CUDA cores, 32 GB of GDDR7 memory and 680 5th gen Tensor cores, but it somehow manages to be remarkably slim and svelte looking to boot. Perhaps the best looking Founders Edition card of all time? You be the judge, but we were suitably impressed. AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D Stand back everyone, it's a monster. AMD's new high-end laptop chip is essentially a Ryzen 9950X3D with a 54 W TDP, which means it should be about as beefy as mobile CPUs come. 16-cores, 32-threads, 144 MB of L3 cache and a 5.4 GHz boost clock makes for a tantalising chip on paper, although thermals remain a question for now. It looks like a staggering amount of silicon for a mobile device on paper, and it'll likely feature in some of the 18-inch models we saw at this year's event -- alongside some chonky cooling solutions, we expect. Still, it's a remarkably highly-specced mobile chip, and looks like a bit of a victory lap for AMD and it's gaming-friendly 3D V-Cache technology, especially now so many laptop manufacturers are starting to choose its mobile silicon over Intel. AMD Ryzen AI Max Ah, Strix Halo. We've been covering the rumours surrounding these mobile chips for such a long time, it feels slightly surreal finally seeing them in the flesh. And specs wise, they don't disappoint. At the top of the range sits the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, a 16-core 32-thread 5.1 GHz beastie with 80 MB total cache. It's the iGPUs on these chips that truly get us hot and bothered, though, as the top chip gets 40 CUs, with 32 CUs each on chips further down the range. Could this mean thin, light, dedicated GPU-less devices that possess the mettle to deliver excellent gaming performance? The Asus ROG Flow Z13 looks like a candidate, although as usual we'll need to benchmark one for ourselves before giving a final verdict. Still, exciting, isn't it? Lenovo Legion Go S Handheld gaming PCs are starting to refine down to a formula, and the Lenovo Legion Go S, on initial appearances, doesn't have a huge amount that makes it stand out. But it's got the right elements in all the right proportions, marrying an eight inch 1200p display with a choice of Z1 Extreme and Z2 Go APUs in a form factor that feels both familiar and comfortable. Plus, it's the first handheld other than the Steam Deck to use SteamOS -- a development that's been a long time coming. There's something confidently refined about this one, although we'll have to put it through the ringer ourselves to see if it holds up to close scrutiny. Nvidia DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation Walking the show floor and taking in the generative AI barbecues (you think I'm kidding) and the AI-touting cat toilets, you'd be forgiven for thinking all the AI implementations at this year's event were nothing but hype. Leave it to Nvidia though, as DLSS 4 looks truly impressive -- not least because it now uses transformer-based AI models that reduce ghosting, improve temporal stability, and provide higher detail for all RTX card users. For the 50-series alone, though, you get Multi Frame Generation, which Nvidia says can multiply frame rates by up to 8x over traditional brute-force rendering. "Fake frame" doubters may protest, but we saw DLSS 4 in action for ourselves -- and all those improvements stack up to look staggeringly good in person. Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 In a world where gaming laptop manufacturers are increasingly soldering hardware to the motherboard to keep things slim, it was truly refreshing to see what Asus was doing with the latest version of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18. Slide a latch on the back panel, and you'll reveal two diagonally-mounted latch-held SSD drives, just begging to be swapped out and upgraded on a whim with nary a tool in sight. The SO-DIMMs are tool-free to access too, meaning this big hunk of gaming laptop should be remarkably easy to upgrade. Chalk one up for a consumer win -- and we can only hope more manufacturers follow suit in future. Alienware Area-51 It wasn't just the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 that impressed us when it came to upgradeability. Alienware makes some desirable (if pricey) gaming PCs, but its tendency to use proprietary parts has traditionally been a sticking point. No longer with the new Alienware Area-51, as it now uses standard ATX motherboards and power supplies. Not only that, but it's festooned the insides with a smattering of QR codes, linking out to tutorial videos on exactly how to remove and upgrade the components. A genuinely good idea, and one that shows -- with the Area-51 models at least -- that Alienware has been taking some of that upgradability critique on board.

CES 2025: My Favorite (and the Worst) Gaming Tech From This Year's Show

CES isn't typically where we see the year's biggest gaming announcements, with major upcoming games usually being saved for summer and winter, and new console announcements now often coming in the spring or fall. But after spending a week in Vegas, I'm now leaving feeling like the gaming industry is about to go through a big shift. Some of it is for the better, with small creators getting a chance to change how we interact with our favorite games, while the rest of it reflects the tech industry's incessant need to stuff useless AI into our lives. With that in mind, here are my four favorite (and three least favorite) gaming announcements from CES 2025. There's no reason we shouldn't all be gaming on our phones more -- and I don't mean Candy Crush. (Not that there's anything wrong with Candy Crush, of course.) These things have gotten powerful enough to run games released for the PS5, but thanks to their lack of physical controls, most developers are still making heavy compromises for their mobile titles. That's where 20-year-old Josh King comes into play. The YouTuber made waves late last year when he released a video showcasing his prototype MCON controller, which uses MagSafe to give your phone a similar form factor to, say, a Nintendo DS. While other phone controllers usually require you to remove your case and can be annoying to take on and off your phone, using the MCON is supposed to be as simple as using a MagSafe power bank. I'm in love with the result. It has a full suite of controls, the magnetic connection is strong, and using it is as easy as snapping it onto my device and flipping out the hidden controls. Plus, if you don't have an iPhone, it works with MagSafe adapters. King is currently working with peripheral company Ohsnap to finalize the design, but if you're sold already, there is a Kickstarter where you can pre-order your own MCON starting at $99. I can't wait to get mine and actually start treating my iPhone like the proper handheld it clearly has the chops to be. Razer's Project Ava is one of two concepts the company's bringing to CES this year, and of the two, I hope it's the one the company leaves behind. Have you ever heard of backseating? It's the phenomenon where a streamer gets stuck while playing a game and their viewers keep piping in via the chat function to tell them how to progress. Most streamers I've seen explicitly ask their audience to avoid it, usually considering it more annoying than helpful. Ava, meanwhile, promises to bring a bespoke AI backseater to everyone with a computer. Essentially, the way it works is that Ava will watch you play and offer tips based on what it sees, loudly speaking over the in-game audio to do so. Razer insists it's not cheating, since Ava can't access information not available to you, but I think that still misses the point. First, it's unclear where Ava's getting its tips, and second, it could end up being pretty distracting if it talks over your gameplay. But really, it's the whole advice angle I have an issue with. If I'm playing Dark Souls, the developers have usually worked out a more elegant way to cue me into when I should dodge than an AI yelling in my ear. If I rely on Ava, I'm training myself to ignore those hints, robbing myself of some of the experience at the least and making myself worse at the game at the most. Even in multiplayer, part of the fun for me is figuring out the best builds and most optimal routes. If Ava is just telling me what I should do, then am I really playing or learning the game, or am I just pressing buttons while the robot makes all the real decisions? There is a place for guides -- far be it from me to gatekeep. But this sort of real-time interruption seems more likely to spoil my fun than enhance it. Valve's Steam Deck is one of my favorite gaming purchases I've made in a long time, making my game library portable with a lot more flexibility than the Nintendo Switch. A big part of that is the company's SteamOS operating system, which makes it convenient to change the handheld's settings and access your Steam games on the fly. Attempts to copy the Steam Deck without SteamOS, like the Asus ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion Go, just haven't done it for me, as they rely on Windows, which is a much clunkier experience when using a controller. These devices are technically more powerful, but the performance increase isn't worth it to me. That's why I'm so excited for the Lenovo Legion Go S. Announced during CES, this will be the first gaming handheld not from Valve to use SteamOS. It'll have Windows versions, too, but starting in May, you'll be able to get it with the operating system I love so much. Even better, it does look to offer specs with a slight-to-moderate improvement on the Steam Deck, and its starting price of $500 is actually cheaper than the entry level Steam Deck OLED. I'm excited to see more partnerships follow suit. Graphics card and now AI company Nvidia is about to fill your game lobbies with bots, but like, in a futuristic way. Announced during CES, Nvidia is working with PUBG developer Krafton to bring "co-playable characters" to the famous battle royale title. Essentially, the experience teams you up with a bot, but you can give it commands to tell it to find armor or weapons for you or coordinate with you in a fight. I could actually see this being really cool in a single-player game, being the next evolution of the type of gameplay seen in titles like Star Wars: Republic Commando. But in multiplayer, it just raises too many questions. Is the bot going to be more aware of the map than humans? How good should it be at shooting, before it starts to feel either like a cheater or a liability? And perhaps most importantly, will it feel satisfying to win if an AI guided you to victory? Or will it be the gaming equivalent of a rich person hiring an experienced hunter to take them on a curated expedition and do all the work except pulling the trigger? There's a lot of tough balancing acts to figure out here, but even assuming everything plays out as desired, I'm still not sure what the point is. Part of the fun of playing a shooter online is knowing that when I take down the enemy, I've ruined some 11-year-old's day. If half the people I'm going to be shooting at are robots, why not just play a single-player game instead? Razer's Project Arielle is the company's second concept device for CES, and the one I'm definitely more excited about. Essentially, it takes the Razer's existing Fujin Pro gaming chair and straps some heaters and a bladeless fan onto it, with surprisingly effective results. What I initially thought was going to be a gimmick turned out to be a nice little oasis on the CES show floor, either warming me up after an hour in the freezing media room or blowing cold air on my back and neck after I spent some time wandering around the sweaty show floor. Sure, you could get a similar experience with a space heater or a fan, but having the climate control integrated directly into your chair allows it immediate access to your back and neck, and I found it felt more effective and comfortable than my desk fan at home. Las Vegas is a nightmare when it comes to consistent temperature, and after a week here, I'm just about ready to stage a heist on this thing and take it home. I'm hoping Razer gives this the same treatment it gave its haptic gaming cushion concept from last year and actually brings it to market. The culture war spares no one, especially when it comes to gaming. If you've looked up The Last of Us Part II or Horizon Zero Dawn on social media, no doubt you've seen photoshops of their female leads that attempt to make them look like they just walked out of a Sephora, despite them spending their games deep in the heart of the apocalypse. Critics have started to call these edits "yassification," and it seems like Nvidia's taking a side here: its new RTX Neural Faces feature might as well be an AI yassification filter. The idea is to help game NPCs cross the uncanny valley by using AI to help with more natural lighting, skin, and hair, especially when players are looking at that NPC from an unusual angle. The result just kind of looks like it's trampling over the artists' carefully made decisions with whatever Nvidia thinks "natural" means. In an example video posted by Nvidia, an NPC with Neural Faces applied seems to have totally different bone structure, a fresh layer of foundation, some new mascara, neater brows, and bigger but much deader eyes. Cool if you're into that, I guess, but it's clearly not the look the modelers or lighting artists were going for, and it definitely wouldn't be appropriate for plenty of gaming's most famous characters...unless you're curious what a Solid Snake makeup tutorial would look like? If the Lenovo Legion Go S stands out from other gaming handhelds because of its software, then the Acer Nitro Blaze 11 is the opposite. Frankly, it's the biggest gaming "handheld" I've ever used, and while that means it's not necessarily the most convenient, there's a certain maximal joy to be taken from carrying it around. With so much room, it's packing some pretty impressive specs, but what really takes the cake is its 11-inch, 2560 by 1600 display. It gets bright, it comes with a sturdy kickstand, and it can display up to 120 frames per second. It's also surprisingly lightweight at 2.3 pounds. That's a pound heavier than the Steam Deck, but compared to a laptop, it's still reasonable. Granted, if you get tired of holding it to play it, the Nitro Blaze 11 does have one trick. Like the Nintendo Switch and the original Lenovo Legion Go, it's got detachable controllers. But unlike those devices, its screen is big enough to make kickstand mode feel worth it to me (I usually just hold the competition). To be honest, at this point in my life, I'm not likely to opt for the Nitro Blaze 11. I'm older, I'm busier, and convenience trumps performance for me. But a younger, more explicitly gamer-y version of me would have been all over this.

The stars are aligning for a perfect PC handheld -- but one thing's missing

CES 2025 Read and watch our complete CES coverage here Updated less than 55 seconds ago Table of Contents Table of Contents It's all coming together Why Nvidia? Nvidia's blind spot At CES 2025, I saw some of the most exciting developments in the world of handheld gaming PCs that I've ever seen, but completely absent from the conversation was Nvidia. It's a world dominated by AMD with its semi-custom designs like the new Ryzen Z2 range, and one that Intel is slowly working its way into with devices like the MSI Claw 8 AI+. Team Green, by comparison, doesn't seem interested. An Nvidia handheld wouldn't inherently be better than the crop of AMD-powered devices we have now, from the Steam Deck OLED to the new Lenovo Legion Go S, but Nvidia already has features and hardware that fit the ethos of handhelds perfectly. But even with so much going for Nvidia in handhelds, it remains one tough nut to crack. Recommended Videos It's all coming together I need to back up first. This year at CES, I saw several new handhelds. There's the aforementioned Lenovo Legion Go S, of course, but also devices like the massive 11-inch Acer Nitro Blaze 11. These devices didn't steal the show for handheld enthusiasts, though; instead it was a seemingly small announcement made by Valve. Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming ReSpec Subscribe Check your inbox! Privacy Policy Alongside revealing that the Lenovo Legion Go S would be the first handheld officially licensed to use the Steam Deck-exclusive SteamOS, Valve revealed that it would be broadening support for SteamOS in April. Then, Valve says, you'll be able to install and use SteamOS on any handheld that you want, albeit with a few issues that Valve can't account for without official licensing. And as our Senior Gaming Editor Giovanni Colantonio will tell you, opening the SteamOS floodgate is a really big deal. So far, you've had to make some sort of compromise with a handheld. You could go with a Steam Deck and get the almost seamless experience of SteamOS, but only with an older, less-powerful AMD chip. Or you could up your power with something like the ROG Ally X, but you'd need to settle for the disjointed handheld experience that Windows 11 provides. Forks of SteamOS like Bazzite are trying to close that gap, but not without a few minor wrinkles. SteamOS today is significantly more mature than it was a couple of years ago. Proton has continued to improve its compatibility, and the vast majority of Windows games play just fine on the Linux-based SteamOS. One of the biggest hurdles for SteamOS, anti-cheat software, has become less of an issue, too. Although there are still games with anti-cheat that simply won't work on SteamOS, including Destiny 2 and Apex Legends, the situation with tools like Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye is much better than it was a few years ago. And newer games, like Marvel Rivals, are looking toward alternative anti-cheat solutions in order to bring the game to Linux. The stars are aligning. Proton is better, anti-cheat isn't as big of a problem as it once was, there's a range of new hardware, and SteamOS will be available to the masses in a matter of a few months. But Nvidia is missing the boat. Why Nvidia? AMD has done incredible work with devices like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally, and Intel has significantly improved from the original MSI Claw to the new Claw 8 AI+. But Nvidia has a lot to add to handheld gaming PCs with DLSS. It's no secret that DLSS has been a big driving force behind the popularity of Nvidia graphics cards over the past few generations, and it's a feature that could completely transform the experience of playing on a handheld. AMD's FSR and Intel's XeSS are solid alternatives to DLSS, but Nvidia's AI-assisted upscaling and frame generation still take the cake when it comes to overall quality and performance. Upscaling is already a major part of playing on a handheld, so much so that the Steam Deck supported system-wide FSR upscaling from day one. And frame generation is becoming even more important, with FSR 3 enabling playable performance in games like Ghost of Tsushima, and AMD's Fluid Motion Frames 2 unlocking playable performance in thousands of games with the ROG Ally X. I don't need to justify the fact that handhelds would benefit from DLSS, especially with the recent announcement of multi-frame generation in DLSS 4. It would not only help improve performance on handhelds with limited access to computing power, it could also improve battery life. After all, if you don't have to manually render every pixel and every frame, you can save quite a bit of power. This is all true of FSR and XeSS, as well. Where DLSS makes the difference is support. XeSS 2 frame generation is only available in a single game at the time of writing, and although FSR 3 is now available in over 75 titles, DLSS 3 is available in close to 150 games. And DLSS Super Resolution is available in over 500 games. As good as the handheld experience is today between AMD hardware and broader SteamOS support, I struggle to believe that the experience with an Nvidia GPU would be worse. There's a reason that, despite being the center of so much criticism, Nvidia continues to maintain a market share above 80% for desktop graphics cards. It makes a good product, pure and simple. It seems like the perfect time to unlock that potential. SteamOS has matured to the point that it's almost seamless to use, and DLSS has some very practical applications in handheld gaming PCs. But there's a reason we haven't seen an Nvidia handheld packing SteamOS up to this point, and why we might not see one for quite some time. Nvidia's blind spot Linus Torvalds: Nvidia, Fuck You! You've probably seen the video above. That's Linus Torvalds, creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel, giving Nvidia a very public middle finger for its lack of driver support on Linux. There's a long history here, but Nvidia has maintained a closed-source driver for Linux for many years, while AMD has stuck with open-source, Mesa-based drivers. Ask any Linux player if Nvidia or AMD is better, and they'll tell you AMD every time. You don't have to just take my word for that, either. I caught up with Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais at CES, and I wanted to know about how long it would take before I could get SteamOS running on any PC. Before I could even finish the question, he asked me, "what hardware are you running?" He was fishing to see if I was using an Nvidia graphics card -- I am -- and for good reason. Although the situation with Nvidia hardware on Linux has significantly improved over the past couple of years after the company switched to an open-source code base, that shift has mainly served to fix major bugs and crashes that would show up with Nvidia GPUs on Linux in the past. Griffais made it clear that the experience today with SteamOS and Nvidia hardware wouldn't be great. If you need more proof of that, you can look toward Bazzite, which says that "Nvidia GPUs are currently in beta with major caveats." That bolding is Bazzite, not me. Or you can listen to NerdNest, who just two weeks ago tried to install Bazzite on an Nvidia laptop only to find that it stopped working after a couple of days. If that isn't enough, here's Linus Tech Tips showing how SteamOS would fail to even boot with an RTX 3060 GPU, and that video was released just a few days ago. Griffais tells me that Valve has a dedicated team of engineers working with Nvidia to improve driver support, and it has for years. In fact, Valve has been working with Nvidia on SteamOS drivers for over a decade, but I suspect the bulk of progress has come in the last couple of years with the success of the Steam Deck and the skyrocketed interest in SteamOS. There's a classic chicken and egg problem here. Nvidia's Linux support is still not where it should be compared to AMD and Intel, so it hasn't built the hardware for a Linux-based gaming handheld. But because that hardware doesn't exist, and because Linux represents such a small portion of the PC gaming crowd, there's not much of a hurry to get Nvidia GPUs working perfectly with SteamOS, and by extension, Linux. There are obvious applications of features like DLSS in a handheld, especially now with multi-frame generation in DLSS 4, but outside of that mold, there are far bigger implications for proper Linux support from Nvidia. As the overwhelmingly dominant supplier of desktop graphics cards, there are a lot of opportunities for SteamOS or forks such as Bazzite to provide console-like gaming experiences to any PC. We won't see that future until the situation with Nvidia and Linux improves, however.