After obsessing with battery life and AI in the past year, it’s great to see PC chipmakers returning (some of) their focus to higher performance for PC gamers in 2025 with several headline launches at the CES show today in Las Vegas.
Both AMD and Intel, preoccupied with the challenge of Qualcomm’s power-efficient Arm processors in the past year, have come up with new desktop PC chips this year that will be good news to PC users seeking more horsepower.
AMD took the wraps off its new Ryzen 9 desktop CPUs – the 9900X3D and 9950X3D – that feature its 3D V-Cache that is highly sought after by gamers for the added performance.
The new chips build on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D out late last year, which has been in short supply, and will be welcome by PC gamers in the new year.
AMD’s top-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D comes with 16 “Zen 5” cores and 32 threads, along with 144MB of cache. The slightly slower Ryzen 9 9900X3D offers 12 cores and 24 threads, with 140MB. Both are out in the first quarter of this year.
Touted as the “world’s best processor for gamers and creators”, the new AMD Ryzen 9 processors are said to better Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K flagship chip from last year, at least in the benchmark tests that AMD has shown the media.
It’s not that Intel is sitting still, of course. After months of being accused of missing out on performance and focusing on power efficiency, Intel has updated its Core Ultra 200S desktop chips with new versions.
No new architecture or cores for this “Arrow Lake” design, unfortunately, but unless you are getting into top-bin performance, the new chips in the existing series will bring more options if you’re not into AMD.
The Intel Core Ultra 9 285, Core Ultra 7 265 and Core Ultra 245 will come without the K moniker, which means you don’t get to overclock them freely.
How appealing they become, as they reach the market this month, will likely depend on the final market pricing – as well as how well AMD can meet demand for its new V-cache-enabled chips.
Besides CPUs, the big news from CES for gaming comes from brand new series of graphics processing units (GPUs) from AMD and Nvidia.
Nvidia, as expected, finally unveiled its GeForce RTX 50 series that will feature the flagship RTX 5090 GPU. It promises as much as double the performance of today’s top-end GeForce RTX 4090.
The new “Blackwell” RTX 50 chips also feature up to 92 billion transistors, providing over 3,352 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS) of computing power.
Besides raw power, Nvidia also showed off a new version of its AI-based DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology, which is said to boost performance in rendering game graphics by up to 8x.
The only issue is cost, of course. The GeForce RTX 5090 GPU will cost US$1,999 when out from January 30, so the GeForce RTX 5080 one step down is likely the “saner” choice for many PC gamers at a still-astronomical US$999.
This is why it’s great news to have AMD around as a strong competitor. While it has been hitting at Nvidia at the mid- to entry-range in the past year or two, it hasn’t been able to challenge the “green camp” in top-end GPU performance.
It’d be interesting to see how AMD’s new GPUs, in the form of the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070, challenge Nvidia for performance and value in 2025.
Available from the first quarter this year, the GPUs are based on AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture and made on a 4-nanometre process so a leap in performance is expected. How much, however, is still to be discovered in more independent tests in the coming months.
Notably, AMD is jumping from its existing RX 7000 lineup to name its new series the RX 9000, to better compare its new GPUs to Nvidia’s.
Perhaps more importantly, AMD is promising improved ray-tracing performance in games, something that Nvidia’s previous-generation of GPUs have had a big lead in.
Plus, the new machine learning-powered upscaling promises high-quality 4K upscaling for users running the best 4K monitors.
If you’re building or buying a new gaming PC this year, know that there are important upgrades coming your way. In terms of CPUs and GPUs, the additional options will mean more choices, whether you want top-end performance or better value at the mid to entry levels.
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