NVIDIA, AMD and Intel aimed for maximum power at CES 2025

There was no question that NVIDIA's RTX 5000 GPUs would be one of the biggest stories at CES 2025, and I figured Intel and AMD to arrive with some new hardware of their own. But I didn't expect that each of these companies would, in their own way, be putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to power for their chip designs. After all, we've spent the last few years covering AI PC CPUs that was targeting efficiency more than raw performance.

While NVIDIA RTX 5000 GPUs seem to deliver the performance leap we expected over its 2022-era cards, AMD is also redefining what's possible for mobile workstations with its Ryzen AI Max chips, which combine powerful graphics with gobs of integrated memory. Intel isn't sitting still either — it's finally moving Arrow Lake into the high-performance and gaming arena with its Core Ultra 200HX chips, which can reach up to 24 cores and 5.5GHz speeds.

I'm not just talking about power in the sheer performance sense, either. NVIDIA's $1,999 RTX 5090 requires a 1,000-watt power supply to function and uses up to 575 watts. The Ryzen AI Max chips, meanwhile, could eat up as much as 120-watts. Intel's Core Ultra 200HX chips go as high as 120-watts. Clearly, none of this hardware is meant for anyone concerned about their energy bills or potential laptop battery life.

So what do you get for all of this energy consumption? AMD says the RTX 5090 will deliver roughly twice the performance of its previous flagship, the $1,499 RTX 4090. In a 4K Cyberpunk 2077 demo with full ray tracing, the 4090 hovered around 108 fps while the 5090 was reaching 240 fps. That frame count is a bit controversial, though, since the RTX 5090's DLSS 4 AI upscaling generates three frames for every natively rendered frame. The end result may look smoother to most people, but some gamers might question the integrity of so-called false frames.

It's those same AI-generated frames that allow NVIDIA to proclaim that the $549 RTX 5070 could be as powerful as the 4090. That may be true when it comes to pure frames-per-second count, but it certainly won't be for rasterized performance without DLSS 4.

AMD's Ryzen AI Max chips aren't aiming for the same sort of graphical heights as NVIDIA's new GPUs, but they're still notable for the sheer amount of hardware they contain. The top-of-the-line Ryzen AI Max+ 395 sports 16 CPU Zen 5 cores, 50 TOPS of AI performance and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units. According to AMD, it should be on-part with Apple's 14-core M4 Pro chip (and even faster in the Vray benchark), and it's 2.6 times faster in 3D rendering than Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V.

In an interview with AMD CVP and product CTO Joe Macri, he told Engadget that the success of Apple Silicon as a major reason why the Ryzen AI Max exists. "What Apple showed was consumers don't care what's inside the box," he said. Macri later noted, "I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I'd been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build, a system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power."

AMD also briefly previewed its RDNA 4 graphics at CES, though at this point it's clearly aiming for the mid-range and not NVIDIA's RTX 5090. Notably, AMD will debut a new AI powered upscaling technology in RDNA 4 GPUs, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4). That should finally give AMD a way to directly compete against NVIDA's DLSS, which for years has looked better than earlier versions of FSR. The first RDNA 4 cards, the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, will arrive sometime in the first quarter.

Intel's presence at CES 2024 was more muted than the competition, but loyalists will likely appreciate the new Core Ultra 200HX chips. While they scale back NPU performance from its recent AI PC hardware (12 TOPS down from 48 TOPS), the Core Ultra 9 285HX looks like a 24-core beast. It'll be interesting to see how it competes AMD's Ryzen AI 300 hardware, though it likely won't stand a chance against the Ryzen AI Max when paired up with a discrete GPU.