What to expect from AMD and NVIDIA at CES 2017

I wasn't going to write this article, but then I thought it would make for some good discussion at the very least. AMD and NVIDIA have a very big year ahead of them, and in my opinion it'll be the biggest year ever for the GPU giants, but AMD has a distinct advantage overall.

2015 was a massive year for both companies with AMD kicking off the very end of 2014 with the unveiling of its Polaris architecture, and then NVIDIA hit multiple home runs in May with the announcement of its Pascal-based GeForce GTX 10 series. It wasn't long after that when AMD launched its Radeon RX 400 series with three cards: the Radeon RX 460, RX 470, and RX 480.

All three cards did quite well, with the RX 470 representing some excellent value for money for 1080p 60FPS gamers - and even some 1440p gamers. The Radeon RX 480 was the fastest Polaris-based graphics card in the line up, but it couldn't begin to touch NVIDIA's latest GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. All of this before the unveiling of the new Titan X, which blows away even the GTX 1080 when stressed in 4K gaming and triple-4K display scenarios.

We've already had a peak at the next-gen Vega GPU architecture from AMD in early December, with AMD showing off a pre-production Vega 10-based card with 8GB of new HBM2 technology running DOOM at 4K 60FPS+ on Ultra/Nightmare settings. AMD also showed Vega 10 off playing Star Wars Battlefront at 4K 60FPS+, too. Impressive stuff, but we're hoping it's early days yet with both hardware and software, and that AMD has some surprises in store for 2017.

I think AMD will wait for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) to better detail the Vega GPU architecture, which kicks off February 27 and runs through to March 3, where I'm sure they'll replicate their Capsaicin event from this year at GDC 16, and better detail its high-end Vega 10 SKU and hopefully - the entire family of Vega products.

NVIDIA on the other hand will most likely unveil the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1060 Ti, or at least I hope. The GTX 1080 Ti is pretty much a given at this point, with the company teasing 4K footage of the upcoming Mass Effect: Andromeda, the perfect game to show the GPU horsepower of the new GTX 1080 Ti.

I think we'll also see a Pascal-based Shield console teased or even released at the show, as it should be close to what NVIDIA provided Nintendo for their upcoming Shield console. We reported on NVIDIA providing a Pascal-based Tegra to Nintendo for their next-gen console, all the way back in May - so a Shield powered by Pascal would make sense, and be completely awesome.

We are only days away from CES 2017 - what do you think we'll see?