14 hours Ago By Chris Coke
CES never has a shortage of laptops and this year was no exception. I scoured the show floor and more than a few jam-packed suites and showrooms to find the biggest trends driving gaming laptops this year. These are the biggest themes we saw guiding this year in gaming laptops.
There has always been a wide range of styles for gaming laptops but something felt extra about it this year. Part of it is because we’re seeing brands like Gigabyte and MSI push ever further into the cross-section between productivity and gaming, but also because there’s a sense that high-end gaming laptops need to deliver something “extra” outside of pure hardware. As always, RGB is a centerpiece of many laptops.
I saw wrap-around lighting rings, light-up mechanical keyboards, side-lights, rear-lights, and trackpad lights. The Asus ROG Strix Scar series made a special impression with its AniME Dot Matrix LED display, which is capable of displaying text, animations, and more across a series of white LEDs on its lid. There isn’t much reinvention happening here, but expect to see some interesting novelties this year alongside the usual range of big and heavy to thin and light laptops with a wide range of hardware.
We saw AI become a selling point for many laptops last year but the integrations often left a lot to be desired. This year, multiple vendors previewed AI Assistants that will help you control your PC without the need to open any software for yourself. In one demo, a representative for MSI demonstrated explaining to the chatbot what type of game he wanted to play and the assistant automatically changed the performance mode to its highest setting to match the intensity of the game.
I’m not sold on this. While these systems seem intended to operate offline (though this was not always clear), I’m not convinced it was actually any faster than just changing settings manually. We’ll have to see how this actually rolls out and what capabilities it actually has.
Mini-LED finally seems to be making waves in the gaming laptop market. Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte each had Mini-LED laptops on display featuring flagship specs and prices. We saw a little bit of this in the past, but it always seemed like the tech needed more time for refinement before hitting its own.
That time appears to have arrived because the laptops I saw were gorgeous. Each had more than 1,100 local dimming zones to reduce blooming and increase contrast, outstanding brightness, and vivid colors. OLED still wins when it comes to contrast, of course, but with no risk of burn-in and higher sustained brightness, I’m excited to see more models coming to the market in the near future.
There were also some novelties. The ASUS ROG Flow X13 is making its return after a year off and features eGPU support through USB4 (so long, proprietary connection). In the suite, Asus had it connected to a new eGPU product I was told will come with up to an RTX 5090.
It’s like the Microsoft Surface after drinking a bathtub of G-Fuel. Elsewhere in its booth, Asus also had its Zenbook Duo, which is a neat dual-screen productivity laptop, but I think Lenovo wins the award for the most interesting new laptop to come out of the show. It’s not a gaming laptop, and I don’t think we’ll see too much of it across the industry this year, but the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is the first notebook to release with a rollable OLED display.
With the push of a button, its 14-inch screen extends upward, unrolling an additional 2.7 inches of screen real estate. It looks awkward, truth be told, and as a first-gen product, I have big concerns about the durability of the extension mechanism.
But, it’s a real product that you’ll actually be able to buy, and should only get better with time and other manufacturers developing the technology. Ultrabooks..
. they’re everywhere, even in gaming line-ups. All of the big manufacturers have Ultrabook gaming laptops now, even if they don’t all call them that: the thin, light, premium-but-minimalist design makes it clear what they’re going after.
Gigabyte, for example, has reworked its Aero line-up to adopt the Ultrabook form factor and the models I saw looked great. And perhaps it’s not surprising. If you don’t need to run the latest games at the highest settings, this new wave of Ultrabooks allows you to play games while still having an exceptionally portable laptop that’s also tremendous for productivity.
As I discovered in my review of the Asus TUF Gaming A14 last year, it’s even possible to add a dedicated graphics card to these machines without also sacrificing what makes them great for on-the-go productivity. But just as importantly, if you’re willing to play around with settings, you can skirt the higher cost of a laptop with a dedicated graphics card entirely. The latest processors from AMD and Intel are surprisingly capable for gaming; the latest handhelds demonstrate this regularly.
Between their higher performance integrated graphics and performance-enhancing features like AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (or Intel XeSS), and frame generation, it’s possible to get relatively demanding games to a playable state. And if you’re just looking to do some gaming on the side, that’s probably enough. It’s enough to make you wonder how much longer low performance chips like the RTX 4050M will even be necessary.
Cloud gaming is another option for these machines. Between Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now , these streaming services have reached a point where you can have a great gaming experience without needing to have a “gaming” laptop at all. There were a lot of exciting developments in the world of gaming laptops and we’ll be covering them all here as the year goes on.
What stood out to you? Let us know in the comments below! Christopher Coke has been a regular contributor to IGN since 2019 and has been covering games and technology since 2013. He has covered tech ranging from gaming controllers to graphics cards, gaming chairs and gaming monitors, headphones, IEMs, and more for sites such as MMORPG.com, Tom’s Hardware, Popular Science, USA Today’s Reviewed, and Popular Mechanics.
Find Chris on Twitter @gamebynight ..
