CES 2025: What to Expect From the Giant Tech Expo

CES 2025 is looming around the corner, and while the annual tech show is usually full of high-tech goodies, this year is going to be especially important for gamers. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is hosting the big CES keynote this year, so you can expect Team Green to be going big. Likewise, we haven’t seen new graphics cards from AMD, so it’s a very strong possibility that CES is going to usher in an entirely new generation of graphics hardware.

The show officially kicks off on January 7, 2025 in Las Vegas, and we’ll be on the ground to get hands on with the tech that we’ll be using over the next year or so. While we’re still a couple weeks away from the show, we can make some educated guesses about what’s going to be at CES 2025.

CES 2025: When is it Happening?

CES 2025 officially kicks off on January 7, 2025. However, the real show starts a day earlier, on January 6, when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang takes the stage for the CES 2025 keynote at 6:30pm PST. CES 2025 will wrap up around January 10.

We expect announcements to happen throughout the week, as the hundreds of tech companies all vie for attention. Companies like Intel, AMD, Samsung and Sony all have their own keynotes scheduled, likely brimming with announcements of their own. There’s going to be a lot of stuff.

What is CES?

CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, is an annual tech convention, where tech companies big and small show off concepts and new products for the new year. Unlike some other trade shows, a big part of CES has always been concepts that give a glimpse into the future, rather than just the products we’ll see at our local Best Buy later in the year – though the latter is still a huge part of the show.

You can expect everything from gaming laptops to flying cars to make an appearance at CES, though this year we suspect the former is going to be the star of the show.

What to Expect From CES 2025

While CES usually has a wide variety of technology on offer, and likely will this year too, the thing we’re most interested in is new GPUs. After all, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is hosting the big keynote that kicks the event off, and I couldn’t imagine Team Green not taking that opportunity to announce something big.

We’re overdue for new graphics cards anyway. Typically, new graphics cards – both from AMD and Nvidia – release on a roughly two-year cycle. Given that the RTX 4090 launched in October 2022 and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX launched in December of the same year, we’re officially overdue for a new generation of graphics cards. It doesn’t hurt that Intel beat both of these companies to the punch with its new graphics card, the Intel Arc B580, either.

With the Intel card already out in the wild, and with the company’s disappointing Core Ultra 200S processors already out, it’s less clear what Intel will have to bring to the table. The Lunar Lake architecture behind AI PCs has been out since September, and it's unlikely that Team Blue will have a follow-up to that architecture already. However, we are still waiting on a new generation of H-series processors from the company. H-series processors are typically reserved for gaming laptops, and offer substantially better performance than the chips behind your thin and light devices.

If AMD does announce new graphics, it’s possible that we might at least get a sneak peak at the AMD Z2 – or whatever the follow-up to the Z1 Extreme will be called. Handheld gaming PCs have blown up over the last year or so, with hits like the Asus ROG Ally X and the Lenovo Legion Go really taking the idea popularized by the Steam Deck and running with it. MSI is heading into the show with the MSI Claw 8 AI already up for preorder, and we can’t imagine it’s the only manufacturer with a handheld to show. After all, we’re still waiting for Alienware to make its Concept UFO from CES 2020 a reality. Given that it’s been 4 years, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it make an appearance.

Beyond PC gaming, though, Sony and Samsung both have major press conferences at the show. While it’s exciting to see Sony at the show, it’s likely that the company is going to focus primarily on their non-gaming segments – think TVs, audio, etc. Likewise, I don’t expect Samsung to announce new phones at the show, though with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra being nearly a year old at this point, we could be surprised.

Like any year, though, there’s no way to predict everything that will be at the show. There are hundreds of companies showing off what they’ve been cooking up, and there is always something huge that takes everyone by surprise. Luckily, because we’ll be on the ground, we’ll be updating this article with all the cool stuff we see in Las Vegas in January, so be sure to keep this page bookmarked.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra