CES 2020 has come and gone, and with it comes a whole slew of new technology to gaze upon… As our wallets spontaneously combust, I’m here to answer the one question on all of your minds… Which announcements of CES pertain to gaming? And which look the coolest? Well… Let’s begin.
Razer has unveiled its own take on the mobile gaming market, with a universal gaming controller that promises to work with “most” smartphones including both Android and iOS devices. This new controller has a number of interesting features including pass-through charging ports that mean you can charge and game at the same time. The controller is also compatible with both mobile games and cloud gaming using GeForce Now as well.
AMD used CES to announce both the pricing and arrival date of the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor – The company’s new flagship CPU will set you back an eye watering $3,990, or £3,053.57 at the current exchange rate.
This monster processor is set to give Intel a run for its money with 64-cores, 128 threads, up to 4.3GHz boost and 288MB of cache. Expect Intel to have something in the works to counter this mammoth CPU. The Threadripper is due for release in February.
Samsung has unveiled another huge gaming monitor that’ll most likely have a huge price tag.
This extreme monitor spans 49-inches and is said to be the first ever screen to boast a 1000R curvature. It boasts a 5120×1440 resolution, 240Hz refresh rate and apparently will have both AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync compatibility too. These are some impressive specs. And, well, look at it! No price was given at the time of release, but expect something well in the £2000 price range.
Asus claims the new ROG Zephyrus G14 is “the world’s most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop”. The G14 is also said to be thin and light while boasting the 4th gen AMD Ryzen CPUs and up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. Couple that with a reported 10 hour battery life, this thing’s a beast! And the laptops party piece? This laptop boasts 1,215 individual mini LED’s on the rear panel that can be customised with personalised logos, gifs or even set to react to music. Unnecessary? Yes. Cool? Definitely!
Originally announced at CES last year, but then only released in Japan, Panasonic’s SC-HB01 gaming soundbar is now coming to the rest of the world by summer 2020. This soundbar has been designed specifically for gamers, with support from Square Enix, and comes equipped with three different modes including RPG, FPS and voice.
It also offers Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and DTS Virtual:X from a 17-inch soundbar with a 2.1 channel, 3-way speaker system that also has a subwoofer built-in. All this plus high-resolution audio playback of up to 192kHz/24bit and you’ve got a gaming soundbar that should offer an amazing alternative to standard PC speakers. I’ll be personally keeping an eye on this one.
Although CES hasn’t seen much in the way of new info on the PlayStation 5, we have seen one reveal – The new logo. Sony also took some time to reiterate things we already knew about the next version of its console. Including the promise of 8K visuals, ray-tracing support and more.
Creative showed off its new upcoming gaming headset – The SXFI Gamer. This headset uses the company’s Super X-Fi audio profile to deliver a tailored sound specifically for FPS games.
The sound of this headset is apparently optimised for “surround sound configuration, higher positioning accuracy and audio fidelity” and is meant to deliver a more precise sound. From experience, ‘3D’ audio has always fallen short. Providing a distorted and sometimes muted experience. We’ll just have to wait and see if Creative have cracked it.
AMD caused controversy by showing a picture of the Xbox Series X during its presentation that seemed to reveal the rear ports of Microsoft’s new console. The company later apologised, though, as this image wasn’t sourced officially, with internet detectives later revealing it to be a stock image of the console from a third-party.
Minor, real Xbox Series X news that did break during CES week, Xbox head Phil Spencer changed his profile photo to that of the console’s chip. That didn’t reveal a whole lot, other than the fact that it’s engraved with ‘8K’ and ‘Project Scarlett’, but at least it was from an official source.
Among MSI’s CES 2020 announcements was the MSI GE66 Raider laptop, which features a 300Hz display, RGB lighting and a limited edition version designed by Collie Wertz, a concept artist of Marvel and Star Wars fame. That’s me sold.
Huge news came on the 1080p gaming front, with AMD announcing the RX 5600 XT graphics card, which boasts impressive benchmarks for modern games and is priced the same as Nvidia’s GTX 1660 Ti.
It touts the new graphics processor as the ultimate choice for 1080p gaming, with enough power to handle recent AAA games at max settings while delivering over 60 fps.
The Radeon RX 5600 XT runs on the same RDNA architecture found in the RX 5500 and RX 5700 cards. It offers up 36 compute units running at a up to 1,560MHz boost clock and aiming for 1,375MHz as AMD’s Game Clock. The cards will include 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM. For non 4K players, that are looking for Nvidia alternatives, this could be big news if the performance is as good as they say.
So that’s it for CES 2020! Which announcements were your favourites from the days? Let me know in the comments below!!
Become a Patron!