CES 2026 Day 0: Nvidia debuts DLSS 4.5, Ryzen 7 9850X3D aims for desktop gaming glory, Intel Panther Lake arrives

(Image credit: Future)

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has officially kicked off this year in Las Vegas, and there was no shortage of announcements, which began pouring in furiously last night. There were no fewer than three major keynotes, with Nvidia, Intel, and AMD each taking the stage to share insights into what they're delivering for 2026 and beyond.

New Nvidia GPUs are a no-show, DLSS 4.5 is incoming, Rubin GPU set to accelerate the AI boom

Nvidia CES 2026 live blog — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

However, it wasn't a total loss for gamers: Nvidia also introduced DLSS 4.5 along with Multi Frame Generation 6X. According to Nvidia, DLSS 4.5 is taking additional steps to improve temporal stability and reduce visible artifacts that can mar on-screen images (shimmering/flickering and trailing "ghosts" behind objects are common complaints), as well as anti-aliasing. Although Nvidia is extending support for DLSS 4.5 to its legacy RTX 20- and 30-series cards, the lack of Tensor Core FP8 acceleration leaves some uncertainties regarding performance.

Given the world's insatiable appetite for everything related to AI, Nvidia introduced its new Vera Rubin NVL72 AI supercomputer. It consists of six distinct chips: the Vera CPU, the Rubin GPU, the NVLink 6 switch, the ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, the BlueField-4 data processing unit, and the Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch. Together, you're looking at a single Rubin GPU delivering up to 50 PFLOPS of inference performance (NVFP4) and 35 PFLOPS of NVFP4 training performance fed by 288GB of HBM4 memory.

Intel Panther Lake is on the prowl

Intel announced 14 SKUs in the new Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) family. The new lineup also includes three SKUs with an "X" designation: the Core Ultra X7 358H, Core Ultra X7 368H, and Core Ultra X9 388H. These chips feature a beefier Arc B390 GPU with 12 Xe3 cores (up from 8 Xe2 cores on the most potent Core Ultra Series 2 chips), which should offer similar performance to a discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050.

Intel Panther Lake specifications. — (Image credit: Intel)

According to Intel, the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H offers up to 60 percent higher multi-threaded performance (Cinebench 2024) than the Core Ultra 9 288V. In addition, gaming performance is reportedly up to 76 percent faster than the Core Ultra 9 285H.

Intel is aiming to deliver the performance of Arrow Lake-H with the efficiency of Lunar Lake with its new Panther Lake family. It looks as though the company is well on its way to meeting that goal.

Intel doubles down on gaming with Panther Lake, claims 76% faster gaming performance — new X-series chips can match discrete RTX 4050

AMD makes the best even better with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, Zen 5 and Strix Halo get refreshed

There’s a new top dog in AMD’s desktop gaming processor family: the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. AMD claims this is the “new fastest gaming processor,” offering a 400 MHz clock-speed advantage over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. This is good enough for an average 7 percent uplift in gaming performance for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D — (Image credit: AMD)

The company also announced the Ryzen AI 400 “Gorgon Point” family, which uses a refreshed Zen 5 APU. There are seven SKUs in the family, topped by the Ryzen AI 9 HX 474, which features 12 cores, a 5.2 GHz max boost clock, 36GB of L2+L3 cache, and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

Asus, Alienware, Dell, MSI, and more announce new laptops for 2026

With AMD and Intel both announcing new mobile processors at CES, new laptops are, of course, incoming as well. Asus, for example, has announced that its new laptops use a mix of Ryzen AI 400 and Core Ultra Series 3 processors, while MSI’s latest laptops are strictly Intel-only. HP even showed Qualcomm some love with its new OmniBook Ultra 14 that supports the Snapdragon X2.

Wi-Fi 8 is just around the corner

Just when we were getting comfortable with Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 8 is currently testing in the prototype stage. However, we’re not expecting any big performance boosts with Wi-Fi 8 (unlike what we saw with Wi-Fi 7). Instead, Wi-Fi 8 is focused on improving reliability, improving short- and mid-range performance, and leveraging technologies like AI to better connect devices (and keep them connected).

The Asus ROG NeoCore Wi-Fi 8 concept router in black and white — Asus ROG NeoCore Wi-Fi 8 concept router (Image credit: Asus)

MediaTek has announced its new Filogic family of Wi-Fi 8 chips that we can expect to see in various consumer electronic devices and networking products, and Asus had its prototype Wi-Fi 8 routers on hand to show real-world performance gains over Wi-Fi 7.

MediaTek unveils Filogic 8000 Wi-Fi 8 family at CES 2026 – new chipsets expected to arrive later this year

Everything else from the show floor

Here's all the rest of the hot tech that was either announced, or that we got to have some hands-on time with at the start of CES 2026.

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Brandon Hill is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware. He has written about PC and Mac tech since the late 1990s with bylines at AnandTech, DailyTech, and Hot Hardware. When he is not consuming copious amounts of tech news, he can be found enjoying the NC mountains or the beach with his wife and two sons.