WITH MOBILE PROCESSORS from Intel, new graphics cards from Nvidia, and a whole host of monitors and laptops from everyone else, this CES had plenty of shiny new tech for us to get excited about. Let’s start with gaming laptops, which are getting thinner, lighter, and more portable than ever before; perfect if you’re looking for a machine that’s small and light enough to take into the office, but powerful enough to slay demons in Diablo at lunchtime. There were also a litany of new OLED monitors, which while still being on the pricey side, are at least going to be available in smaller sizes, so you no longer need a massive desk to accommodate one.
Predictably, the buzzword of CES 2024 was AI, and entertainment could be had counting the number of references to the shareholder-pleasing term during keynotes. In reality, we did see some cool uses of artifical intelligence, most notably in Lenovo’s Legion laptops, which will sense what you’re doing with your PC and apply overclocking settings if it’s gaming or creative work, or throttle things down for word processing to save battery.
With that said, here are the best products we saw at the show, and the tech we’re most anticipating this year. Best get saving now.
NVIDIA’S AI NON-PLAYABLE CHARACTER
Not so much a product as a tech demo showing how we may soon interact with game characters, this was built in Unreal Engine 5, and uses AI tech from startup Convai. In the demo, you enter a ramen restaurant in a cyberpunk world, and start a conversation with Jin, the bartender, and Nova, a customer. Instead of choosing from a few pre-written questions, though, you just talk into a microphone, and the characters audibly respond to whatever you ask. You can order some ramen, find out if they’ve ever traveled to the Grand Canyon, what brand of GPUs they prefer—anything you can think of, with accurate and even quite funny responses during
