Nvidia Dominates CES 2025 Despite High Prices

At CES 2025, the spotlight was squarely on Nvidia, even with its eye-popping price tag of $2,000 for the new RTX 5090 graphics card. This year’s show proved to be less about competition and more about what Nvidia presented. While Intel rolled out only a few basic updates and AMD's overly packed presentation seemed to overlook what could be its biggest GPU launch, it became clear that Team Green emerged as the leader of the event.

However, Nvidia’s victory is not attributed to the price of the RTX 5090, but rather to its innovative technologies. The new graphics card's capabilities are enhanced by significant advancements in AI, and while the results may not be immediately apparent, they hold great potential for the future of PC gaming.

Among the highlights were developer-friendly tools such as Neural Materials and Neural Texture Compression, but the real breakthrough came with neural shaders. Although this may not sound as thrilling as announcing a shiny new graphics card, the introduction of neural shaders has profound implications for the gaming world. This single announcement can justify Nvidia's dominant position at this year’s event.

Neural shaders enable developers to incorporate small neural networks directly into shader code, which can utilize the capabilities of the graphics card’s Tensor cores during gameplay. This integration allows for much more complex calculations and efficiencies that were previously limited mainly to technologies like DLSS.

Innovating with Neural Technology

Nvidia's applications of neural shaders include three impressive technologies: Neural Materials, Neural Texture Compression, and Neural Radiance Cache. Of these, Neural Radiance Cache stands out as it enables AI to infer how light interacts in a scene, enhancing real-time path tracing by suggesting what light bounces would look like without having to compute each one. This drastically improves both visual quality and performance.

Neural Materials take dense shader codes that would typically require extensive processing to achieve cinematic quality and allow them to be rendered in real time. Similarly, Neural Texture Compression applies artificial intelligence techniques to reduce memory usage by a factor of seven compared to traditional compression methods, all while maintaining image quality.

The Future of AI in Gaming

This is just the beginning for neural networks in gaming. With all major GPU manufacturers, including AMD and Intel, venturing into AI technologies, there's likely to be rapid development in how these neural networks will be integrated into future games.

There may be room for more advanced simulations, such as clothing dynamics or physics calculations that can be processed on the GPU using neural networks instead of the CPU. Additionally, the potential to improve model complexity in games through AI could revolutionize graphics rendering.

While CES can overflow with announcements deemed 'ground-breaking,' the impact of Nvidia’s neural shaders is tangible and substantial. Currently, we see just the initial offerings of what these technologies may offer in years to come. Nevertheless, when observing what competitors like AMD and Intel presented, it’s clear that only Nvidia unveiled something that could truly be called innovative this year.

Nvidia, graphics, AI, neural, gaming