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Tom’s Hardware Innovation Awards 2026: Progress amid turmoil

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Affordable memory and storage are the only missing link.

Tom's Hardware Innovation Awards 2026 cover image
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The tech industry faces unprecedented challenges as the continued disruption from AI-driven shortages has driven pricing to record highs and supplies to record lows.

However, even amidst the damage we've seen in the PC market, the industry is still moving forward, giving us plenty of new devices over the last year that continue to push the bar higher.

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The Editors of Tom's Hardware
The Editors of Tom's Hardware

Tom's Hardware is the leading destination for hardcore computer enthusiasts. We cover everything from processors to 3D printers, single-board computers, SSDs and high-end gaming rigs, empowering readers to make the most of the tech they love, keep up on the latest developments and buy the right gear. Our staff has more than 100 years of combined experience covering news, solving tech problems and reviewing components and systems.

16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hotaru251
    Reports indicate those denser GDDR7 chips are quite costly, though, and any increase in VRAM capacity on gaming graphics cards would immediately make them better for local AI applications while offering little performance benefit to the vast majority of games available today.

    this is misleading.
    Many games made now (i pray you arent assuming "vast majority included old games which run fine even on 8+yr old gpus) are actually starting to use more vram (near any game with "high quality assets require 16gb MINIMUM) ...nvidia specifically is an awful offender of giving bare minimum of vram unless you give em too much $.in 2026 no gpu made for gaming should be less than 16 gb.
    You have the games requiring more vram as time goes on and then you have "frame gen" which also wants vram on top of that.

    so increase in vram DOES benefit gaming and not just local ai applications.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Monitor: Alienware AW3426DW
    Cool wallpaper, what is it?

    CQDIMMs hit the scene promising increased density, 128GB per stick, and much faster speeds.
    CQDIMM is legitimately innovative. I'm thinking we'll see 96 GB dual-rank and 192 GB quad-rank before the generation is over.

    I considered the CAMM2 design standard and any boards that support it, as it is unique and innovative. However, it’s still a twinkle in the industry's eye, and only prototype and concept boards seem to exist in the wild.
    Good call. The future of upgradeable memory looks very murky. I don't think CAMM is very relevant even in laptops. Of course, the horror show of the mempocalypse makes ramping up the volume of an entirely new form factor a complete disaster.

    The MacBook Neo stunned the world.
    As a connoisseur of cheap laptops, I stunned myself by getting Raptor Lake-U and upgrading it to 40 GB for around $320 total.

    Wildcat Lake targeting basically MacBook Neo -$100 was disappointing. Wildcat Lake is nice as an Alder Lake-N killer. I'd prefer to see Panther Lake-U with 4 Xe cores in the MacBook Neo price bracket, closing the graphics gap with A18 Pro. Wildcat Lake Refresh allegedly adding another 2 P-cores misses the point.

    AMD doesn't have a real answer to these chips, but capable Krackan Point laptops were selling at similar prices before things got bad. Sonoma Valley must be dead and buried by now. Zen 6 Bumblebee sounds much more promising. Hopefully, AMD can get ahold of enough N3P to make a splash in budget APUs.

    hotaru251 said:
    so increase in vram DOES benefit gaming and not just local ai applications.
    I think the "little performance benefit to the vast majority of games available today" statement is kind of true if you consider the 5080 Super and 5070 Ti moving from 16 GB to 24 GB. There are few games that need more than 16 GB. I think MS Flight Sim (under certain settings) was one.

    5070 Super is more contentious, since 12 GB is not bad but 18 GB is much better. I think that card would be the subject of serious analysis to see if it can actually get good performance at the settings that need more than 12 GB.

    Only those three SKUs were leaked a while back, which is probably what The Editors of Tom's Hardware are drawing on, but there's revived talk of a 5060 Super, which would obviously be improved by moving to 12 GB. But that would also obviously be crushed by high GDDR7 pricing. Same story with the 5050 9GB, which is considered dead. While everyone would go ballistic over Jensen's generous +1 GB to gamers, I think 9 GB would be quickly found to be very helpful.
    Reply
  • comedichistorian
    "...until earlier this year, when Logitech dropped its Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike earlier this year"

    great article, just wanted to help with some editing
    Reply
  • salgado18
    Well, that answers the question: what is the limit in gaming graphics? And the answer is: we've just reached it! Not because we can't advance, but because there won't be new gaming GPUs. So devs now have to optimize, instead of going big.

    That said, I still don't understand why Wildcat Lake is inovation. It's just a small chip at the right time, no? There's nothing new or innovative about it. Should be left out.

    Then there's a fundamental question: make your mouse hands cooler or faster? Choices, choices...
    Reply
  • Zaxyss
    I bought 9950X3D2 and I love it, It was first power hungry so I undervolted it with PBO -30 on all cores and set Vsoc to 1.025V Stable and now I have my idle consumption be 30-40 watts (the same as my previous 7900X3D) instead of double of that with stock.

    I bought it mainly becase
    1. some game lock ability to set game cores to x3D in lasso(thanks to anticheat)
    2. For speed of procesing cache shaders that took quite a long time in some games.
    3. Windows run so smoother when you doing many taks same time.
    Reply
  • Bigshrimp
    Hopefully China will fill in the gap since they have been ramping up their technological production capabilities, like their memory chip manufacturing and so on. I imagine it will take time, but at least they may have some say in the future regarding the worldwide PC market.

    The PC market in the USA is all but destroyed at this point, sadly.
    Reply
  • usertests
    salgado18 said:
    That said, I still don't understand why Wildcat Lake is inovation. It's just a small chip at the right time, no? There's nothing new or innovative about it. Should be left out.
    Wildcat Lake is kind of a successor to Alder Lake-N, and a pretty good (but not perfect) conception of what the low-end needs. Laptops certainly, and "desktops" (mini PCs).

    It's using Intel 18A, not some older node. It's certainly new, as basically a distilled version of Panther Lake. You get the latest P-cores for high single-threaded performance, and 4 LPEs to round out the multi-threaded performance.

    https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/7351vs3098vs7322vs7315vs3334/Intel-3-304-vs-Intel-i7-8700K-vs-Intel-5-315-vs-Intel-7-350-vs-Intel-i9-9900Khttps://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5157vs5213vs7351vs7315vs5008/Intel-N100-vs-Intel-i3-N305-vs-Intel-3-304-vs-Intel-7-350-vs-Intel-i5-13600K
    The end result is an x86 chip for the low-end with multi-threaded performance between an i7-8700K and i9-9900K, and single-threaded performance between an i5-12400 and i5-13600K. Subject to change based on the specific SKU and cooling.

    To really get the lowest prices, you have to buy the Intel 3 304 with lower clocks and only a single P-core, but that chip still outperforms the Core i3-N305 in MT.

    Wildcat Lake's CPU performance could be considered a "Sandy Bridge" moment for low-end, Atom class PCs. It's just going to be enough performance for many people, for a very long time. But pricing is considerably higher than Alder Lake-N, in part because of the memory/storage crisis, but not completely. The Minisforum Elite Mini M2 Air-304 is a barebones box with the worst WCL chip at a $263 early price ($329 real price).

    Integrated graphics is where the Wildcat Lake design stumbles. 2 Xe3 cores aren't so terrible, but slashing it in half in the 304 sends it back to the realm of Alder Lake-N. We're already seeing a lot of 304-based products, which could indicate it's like the new N100, a severely gimped version of the full die that will be spammed on the market. Wildcat Lake Refresh allegedly adding two P-cores improves the area where it doesn't really need improvement. Should go to 4 Xe3 instead. It may be a consequence of how tiles are being used, but I don't think Wildcat Lake shares anything with Panther Lake or any other product.

    There's also PCIe 4.0 x6 vs. PCIe 3.0 x9 in Alder Lake-N. More overall bandwidth, but the lower lane count limits applications.

    Intel may not be done with E-core-only products, as it may be planning a successor called "Moon Lake". I think it would be a mistake to regress in ST in the low-end, but if it's an embedded-only product line then it's not a big deal.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    hotaru251 said:
    this is misleading.
    Many games made now (i pray you arent assuming "vast majority included old games which run fine even on 8+yr old gpus) are actually starting to use more vram (near any game with "high quality assets require 16gb MINIMUM) ...nvidia specifically is an awful offender of giving bare minimum of vram unless you give em too much $.in 2026 no gpu made for gaming should be less than 16 gb.
    You have the games requiring more vram as time goes on and then you have "frame gen" which also wants vram on top of that.

    so increase in vram DOES benefit gaming and not just local ai applications.
    You also need to put in as a disclaimer that 8GB is insufficient with maxed out settings at 1440p and 4K native resolutions, and that high settings certainly drops VRAM requirements below 12GB and often gets below 8GB as well.

    So yes, you're right that the placebo effect of max settings combined with high resolutions requires 12GB and sometimes even 16GB. But if you're not chasing the bragging rights associated with those things? You're probably fine in the near-term with whatever GPU you're already running. ("You" being any gamers, not you specifically... though I suspect you are as well. :) )
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    that the placebo effect
    except even 1080p can eat over 8gb vram not just placebo.
    Games now want you to use framegen which costs more vram. if your game already ate a lot of vram and now you need more vram to run higher framerate becasue of poorly optimized game devs..you STILL will use more than that vram.

    MHWilds for example at launch (poorly optimized game that it was..better now) at 1080p would use more than 8GB vram (you had texture popping in and out due to overflow which was massively distracting and noticeable) with framegen to hit acceptable framerate and look good.
    So a 12gb 3060 would run game better than a "better" 3060 ti 8gb because the assets couldnt fully fit in the limited vram.


    point of my statement was that more vram benefits modern gpu's game performance (let alone the future games ppl will play on said gpu's as ppl can use same gpu for a decade at times) and not just "ai".
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    hotaru251 said:
    except even 1080p can eat over 8gb vram not just placebo.
    Games now want you to use framegen which costs more vram. if your game already ate a lot of vram and now you need more vram to run higher framerate becasue of poorly optimized game devs..you STILL will use more than that vram.

    MHWilds for example at launch (poorly optimized game that it was..better now) at 1080p would use more than 8GB vram (you had texture popping in and out due to overflow which was massively distracting and noticeable) with framegen to hit acceptable framerate and look good.
    So a 12gb 3060 would run game better than a "better" 3060 ti 8gb because the assets couldnt fully fit in the limited vram.


    point of my statement was that more vram benefits modern gpu's game performance (let alone the future games ppl will play on said gpu's as ppl can use same gpu for a decade at times) and not just "ai".
    How many games, right now, need more than 8GB of VRAM at 1080p high settings with DLSS/FSR, including framegen? I'm sure the number isn't zero, but even for recent releases, it's still a pretty small figure. Poor coding and such can also be a factor (like in MHWilds, and other games too like FFXVI), but in general? No, you don't absolutely NEED 8GB for 1080p.

    Even 1080p ultra, I would say 90% or more of recent releases will generally work... or if they don't have enough VRAM, there's a good chance that the settings are also beyond what most 8GB GPUs can handle even if they had more VRAM. (Meaning, enabling ray tracing can increase VRAM use, but on a 3070 you probably don't want to try maxing out the RT settings.)

    Look, I get it. All things being equal, I'd like GPUs to have more VRAM than most of them currently do. But with what's going on with memory prices? Yikes! NVIDIA doubled the price of the RTX Pro 6000 basically because of VRAM price increases. Legitimately, I'm not sure anyone could actually sell an RTX 5090 at its original MSRP now and still make a sustainable profit. MSRP has become a publicity stunt for GPUs like that. BOM for NVIDIA on an RTX 5090 FE is probably pushing well above $1000 now.
    Reply