CheckMag | A quarter into the year, CES 2025 has already aged like milk

It's already been a bit over three months since Nvidia, AMD, and Intel had us sitting down and sifting through livestreams filled with thick, investor-speak sludge to find the brief nuggets of information that were actually relevant to the people who buy their chips. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it's rather looking like most of those nuggets have turned out to be fool's gold, their false shine scrubbed away by marketing blunders and unforced errors - not many of these may be new stories, but they paint a picture of how this has been the worst-aging CES in years.
 

Nvidia the Gormless

The biggest example of poorly aged proclamations in the room is, of course, the claim of the RTX 5070 matching the RTX 4090 in performance - but it's quite astounding that the claim was even made to start with. It might have been the case that Jensen wanted to follow through with the biggest leaps of previous generations, like the RTX 3070 matching the RTX 2080 Ti before it, but this time it should've been clear from the outset that such a claim wasn't going to hold water. And it didn't - it was beaten into the dirt the second review media got a hold of it, just like the much more recent attempt to hide how badly the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB would perform by only sampling the 16 GB model to reviewers.

Their other big announcements may have all been AI-related instead of for gamers, but those haven't come across looking any inept. Integrating an AI assistant into gaming graphics card software reeked of a solution searching for a problem, and looked increasingly tone-deaf as Nvidia's drivers started to rack up issues - but perhaps more notably, its Project DIGITS mini-PC designed for local AI was beaten to the punch (and to its selling point of having more memory than any non-datacentre GPU) by AMD's Strix Halo APU...

AMD the Gutless

...you know, the one that seemed perfectly positioned to steal Nvidia's thunder, only to show up in a mere handful of products? The one that (at least, based on how the Framework Desktop implementation of it isn't even shipping until Q3 this year) isn't being made in enough volume to seize the opportunity that got dropped in AMD's lap, because it didn't possibly foresee that a product that neatly fit into the booming local-AI niche would be popular? 

That one.

Instead of poor execution, the first three months of the year for Team Red have been marked by a downright refusal to take any initiative. The RX 9070 XT showing up in the flesh at CES yet not being actually announced is the most infamous example of this for sure, but having to crowdsource a good price from tech media and still ending up uncertain enough that the final announcement was overdubbed made Radeon look laughably passive. Of course, the next major release - the RX 9060 XT - was pursued with much more boldness... hence why there's so little news about it that gamers have been chomping at the bit for anything but leaks and rumours between now and its expected 18 May release date. AMD Gaming's YouTube channel provided, in the form of a mystery livestream... that turned out to be an underwhelming showcase of FSR 4 in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. 

In a way, maybe AMD's CES presentation aged well - because it continues to be consistent with its strategy of waiting for Nvidia's product not only to release, but for its controversy to blow over and its price to start to stabilise, before making any move at all.

Intel the Grim

Intel... well, Intel wasn't having a great time even when CES was rolling around, and it didn't really have anything to show off. But everything it already had at the time - both products and plans - have still aged poorly. The news of already-released Battlemage graphics cards being bottlenecked by older CPUs came to the forefront right after CES ended, and later that month its next generation Nova Lake desktop chips were confirmed to not arrive until 2026. In that same call, the company's follow-up Panther Lake mobile CPUs were supposed to be coming later this year, but leaks suggest even that's slipped. For Intel, all it has is what's out right now, and when those are growing stale already, it's going to be a long three more quarters sitting out on the kitchen counter.