CES 2022: Products gamers should keep an eye on

The Consumer Electronics Show 2022 (CES 2022) had somewhat of a rough timeline, with major electronic companies pulling out from doing any kind of live keynotes and on-site product launches weeks before the event due to the rising cases of the COVID-19 variant, Omicron.

The organising team of CES 2022 has also taken steps to end the event a day earlier than scheduled due to this.

Nevertheless, we've still had a couple of interesting product launches from the various tech giants in the industry through recorded keynotes, and here are our top 3 news bites of the event that should interest gamers.

1. New Graphics Cards

Nvidia and AMD revealed their new line of budget desktop graphics cards at CES 2022, with Nvidia announcing the RTX 3050 and AMD announcing the Radeon RX 6500XT and Radeon RX 6400.

Both the RTX 3050 and the RX 6500XT are touted to excel in 1080p gaming, but in terms of raw specifications, the RTX 3050 seems to have a slight advantage over the RX 6500XT.

The RTX 3050 comes with a generous amount of 8GB GDDR6 memory while the RX 6500XT only comes with 4GB of GDDR6.

While having double the memory size, it is still too early to say if the RTX 3050 will be able to fully utilise this amount of GDDR6 that is present on the card to its advantage.

Looking at how modern games are slowly requiring more and more graphics memory even at lower settings, the RTX 3050 seems like the better buy for the consumer, if they are afraid of having limited graphic memory space on their cards.

However, when you take a look at their suggested retail pricing, the RX 6500XT wins the battle hands down with a price of US$199, compared to the RTX 3050, which starts of at the price of US$249.

Hopefully there are enough of these cards to go around that we won’t see any kind of price increase happening due to the GPU shortage.

The AMD Radeon RX 6400 is an even lower spec GPU, running at only 53w, which eliminates the need for a power cable to keep the card running.

However, there have been no official statements from AMD on the purpose of this card’s existence. Our guess? It is probably made for PCs that do not have the need to game, but still need something much better than an integrated GPU to run, much like Nvidia’s GT130.

Speaking of Nvidia, on the other opposite end of the spectrum, they also revealed the RTX 3090 Ti. Nvidia will reveal more information about this card in the coming weeks.

2. New CPU reveals

Perhaps the most exciting yet disappointing CPU reveal comes in the form of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

It contains AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology, that you can read about here. To put it in extremely layman terms, AMD has managed to stack the cache die of the CPU on top of each other, instead of just having a single layer of cache on the CPU.

This allows for faster input and output of data from the CPU as the cache is usually used to store temporary data that will be needed by the CPU to be processed. So the larger the cache is, the more data can be processed by the CPU in a shorter time.

In comparison, the Ryzen 9 5950x has a total of 72MB of L2+L3 cache, while the 5800X3D has a whopping 100MB cache.

This number may seem small in this day and age, but in CPU terms, it's a huge bump in cache size for a Ryzen processor. This is the exciting part.

Because of this bump in cache, AMD has said that it is much faster in gaming than their own Ryzen 9 5900x and Intel’s new generation Core i9-12900K.

However, disappointingly, that was the only processor revealed that contained the 3D V-Cache technology. There were no reveals of an updated 5900x or a 5950x.

Besides that, AMD also reveals that their next-gen processors will come in the 2nd half of 2022. The Ryzen 7000 series will be using the new AM5 socket and it will be using DDR5 for RAM.

There is no indication if the 3D V-Cache will make an appearance in the next-gen CPUs.

AMD and Intel also introduced new laptop CPUs in the form of the Ryzen 6000 series mobile CPUs and the i9-12900HK.

3. Laptops rivalling PC desktop counterparts

Since AMD and Intel have launched their new mobile CPUs, they will also be partnering with a few companies to include these processors in their upcoming laptop launches.

Razer will be releasing their new line of Razer Blades that will see the implementation of the AMD Ryzen 6000 processors (up to 8 cores/16 threads) together with the supported DDR5 memory.

The laptops will also be including the mobile versions of the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti. The new generation Razer Blades will come in 14, 15 and 17 inches in screen sizes.

Acer will also be looking to release Predator series gaming laptops, with the highlight being the Predator Triton 500 SE.

At just 19.9mm, the Triton 500 SE will come with an Intel 12th Gen i9 processor, highly likely the Core i9-12900H (14 cores/20 threads), and is able to house a mobile RTX 3080 Ti.

It will come in the screen size of 16 inches, with a 240hz panel and a 2560x1600 resolution.

MSI will also release a similarly spec-ed laptop with their new Creator Z16P. MSI has also said that the Z16P will only have a thickness of 19.9mm, and include an Intel i9-12900H and a Nvidia RTX 3080Ti.

This is indeed a great season for laptops. With mobile CPUs rivalling their desktop counterparts in terms of cores and clock speeds, and with GPUs like the mobile RTX 3080 Ti, one can rest assured that purchasing a current-gen laptop will not limit their workload, especially in intensive tasks.

While there were other noteworthy reveals like new displays and television technology from the likes of Samsung and Sony at CES 2022, we feel like the PC and laptop space gained the most at the event.

The new budget graphic card reveals could hopefully ease the already scarce GPU market, and it is always nice to see AMD and Nvidia outdoing each other for the betterment of technology.

The same could be said in the CPU space as well, with AMD and Intel trying their best to one-up each other and producing better products for the people.

At the end of the day, the consumers win, and that is all that matters.

Dominic loves tech and games. When he is not busy getting headshotted in VALORANT or watercooling anything he sees, he does some pro wrestling.

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