CES 2019: NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel Make A Splash

It’s that time of year again and CES 2019 is here. Outside of all the AI, Self-driving vehicles, drones, and other knick-knacks, CES is also a place where board/card partners get to show off their new motherboards, GPUs, laptops, monitors, and a whole lot more. We here at Overclockers.com have boots on the ground and have nearly 20 meetings with industry leaders including AMD, NVIDIA, ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, Kingston, ADATA, Patriot, and more!

Over the next couple of days, we’ll bring you coverage straight from the hotel suites where our partners show showing off their new wares. We will also have additional, and likely more frequent, updates on Facebook which is easily accessed from the link below. Our CES 2019 tag page will also have all of our coverage listed.

On the eve of CES, major industry players had a chance to take the stage and share what they have to offer. NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel shared news today with a new affordable RTX GPU and G-Sync expansion, AMD mobility CPUs, and more information regarding Intel’s foray into the discrete GPU market.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s announcements today covered several items including advancements and plans in AI, over 40 new laptop models using their new Turing architecture. Turing cards from the RTX 2080 to the just announced RTX 2060 can be found inside these new laptops from major OEMs. The melding of the Max-Q design which shrinks GPUs so they can fit into small form factors, allows these partners to deliver smaller, faster, lighter, and more powerful mobile devices. Look to see these on store shelves around January 29.

Performance of the card is said to be in the ballpark of the last generation GTX 1070Ti. Assuming this as fact, users are able to purchase the latest technology at similar price points and performance  which, until now, hasn’t been achieved with Turing (price being the biggest jump). Availability on these cards will start on January 15th. Over the coming days, we will get to see board partner cards from ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, and EVGA. We’ll have a review on it soon as the card landed the day we arrived at CES.

The last item of note from the NVIDIA camp is their announcement of additional G-sync models including 4K HDR displays and lower resolution, high hertz models. But this wasn’t the shocker. The big news came from them announcing the expansion of the G-Sync ecosystem to now include hundreds of monitor models available capable of variable refresh rates (VRR) using the VESA DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync protocol. With the VRR gaming experience can vary widely, NVIDIA completed testing on 400 monitors and was able to approve 12 with more on the way. Those that pass the test, the updated driver will enable G-sync by default. Depending on how many monitors are able to pass this test, it could be a large expansion and bring the sweet synced frames of G-Sync to a more affordable price point.

Support for G-Sync compatible monitors will be available on January 15th with the release of the first Game Ready driver of 2019.

Intel

Intel, like NVIDIA, announced several items spanning AI to home connectivity, and more. For our crowd, the real news was in the teaser regarding their impending discrete GPUs. Although we love our friends at AMD and NVIDIA for their contributions in this area, more competition in this space can only be helpful, in particular the high-end space.

Intel shared a few slides showing off where the iterations of the discrete GPU, dubbed, Xe. Xe will grace us with its presence after the new Gen11 graphics engine noting this will be a transition from the “gen” naming scheme. The new GPU will be able to scale from integrated GPUs, discrete GPUs ranging from mid-range, enthusiast, all the up to data-centers. Intel says they are still on target with a 2020 debut for the Xe-based graphics.

On the desktop processor front, there is a new i5 in town, the i5-9400 along with five other unmentioned models. The i5-9400 Coffee Lake refresh is a 6 core/6 thread processor using a base clock of 2.9 GHz and turbo boost at 4.1 GHz. From internet ramblings, the expected models are to include Core i3-9350KF, i5-9600KF, i7-9700KF, and i9-9900KF, and a potential i3-9300. The first of these should see store shelves towards the end of January.

Additional announcements and more information are available on Intel’s CES microsite.

AMD

Not to be outdone, AMD dove headfirst into CES announcing new Picasso series APUs, as well as H-series and A-series processors. The new processors are a refresh to the second generation Ryzen 3000 series chips which includes the 3, 5, and 7 series. The H-series chips are slated for mainstream gaming laptops, while the two A-series processors make a surprising visit in the Chromebook market. Chips will range from the AMD Athlon 300U, a 15W, 2c/4t CPU running at 2.4/3.3 GHz base/boost clock to the Ryzen 3750H 35W, 4c/8t CPU which runs at 2.3/4.0 GHz.

CES 2019 Coverage

Please keep an eye out on the front page and our facebook page for updates at CES throughout the week. Do you have a question for one of the companies we will see, please list it in the comments below and we will see what we can do!

– Joe Shields (earthdog)