The NVIDIA GeForce CES 2021 Live Blog: Game On

11:57AM EST - Kicking off in a few minutes is NVIDIA's keynote for CES 2021. Dubbed “GeForce RTX: Game On”, the keynote is going to be presented by Jeff Fisher, NVIDIA’s Senior VP for GeForce

11:57AM EST - NVIDIA has not given us any concrete messages about what to expect from today's hour-long keynote, but based on some of their teasers in the last few days, it looks like we're in store for the launch of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series laptop parts, which typically follow NVIDIA's desktop parts by a few months

11:57AM EST - Despite its scaled-down size, CES this year has been a big event for laptop news, so new laptop GPUs would fit right in for today's news

11:58AM EST - AMD's own keynote is just wrapping up next-virtual-door, and they too have spent a good amount of time focusing on laptops - primarily the CPU/APU side of things - so it's definitely a big year for laptops

11:59AM EST - Meanwhile, the big question of the morning: where will NVIDIA's keynote be recorded from?

11:59AM EST - Previous GeForce events have been MC'd by Jensen Huang himself, and thus recorded out of his kitchen

12:00PM EST - Will we be seeing Jeff Fisher's kitchen? Or perhaps something more traditional? We're about to find out

12:00PM EST - And here we go

12:01PM EST - Starting things off with an intro montage of games

12:02PM EST - And now Jeff

12:02PM EST - (This appears to be shot in Jeff's house, though not his kitchen)

12:02PM EST - Jeff is recapping the growth in gaming over the past couple of years

12:03PM EST - "Gaming has become an integral part of our lives"

12:03PM EST - Now on to tech, recapping the introduction in 2018 of NVIDIA's RTX ray tracing technology

12:03PM EST - And last fall, NVIDIA's Ampere architecture & GeForce 30 series desktop cards

12:04PM EST - "Ampere has been our fastest selling architecture ever"

12:04PM EST - Over 2x the prior generation

12:04PM EST - NVIDIA is still trying hard to catch up to demand

12:05PM EST - And NVIDIA continues to push forward with their GeForce Now game streaming service

12:06PM EST - Now recapping/promoting the latest generation of NVIDIA's DLSS temporal anti-aliasing and upscaling technology

12:07PM EST - More games are coming with "RTX" functionality, such as Call of Duty: Warzone, which is getting DLSS support

12:08PM EST - DLSS is also coming to Square Enix's Outriders

12:08PM EST - (This is a good point to note that RTX is an umbrella term for NVIDIA; it's not just ray tracing, but DLSS and other advanced features)

12:09PM EST - The latest Five Nights at Freddy's is also getting RT and DLSS

12:11PM EST - Continuing down the promo list, FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch is getting RT and DLSS too

12:12PM EST - Now on to Esports

12:12PM EST - Starting with a recap of NVIDIA's Reflex latency reduction tech

12:13PM EST - Rainbox Six Siege and Overwatch are going to be adding Reflex support

12:14PM EST - NVIDIA is announcing 5 new G-Sync monitors today, all of which offer the GeForce Reflex Analyzer, which allows for measuring click-to-photon latency

12:14PM EST - It looks like we're finally on to video cards

12:14PM EST - "Modern games need more power"

12:15PM EST - Introducing the GeForce RTX 3060

12:15PM EST - 2x the raster and 10x the RT performance of the GTX 1060

12:16PM EST - The GTX 1060 was one of NVIDIA's most successful video cards ever. They're going to be working for quite some time to dislodge it

12:16PM EST - 13 Shader TFLOPS, 101 Tensor TFLOPS

12:16PM EST - 12GB GDDR6 memory

12:16PM EST - Available in late February for $329

12:17PM EST - And that's it for RTX 3060 desktop

12:17PM EST - Now on to laptops

12:17PM EST - Jeff is recapping NVIDIA's Max-Q laptop design program

12:18PM EST - NV is introducing a third generation of Max-Q tech, which the company is calling AI-powered

12:18PM EST - First up: Dynamic Boost 2.0

12:18PM EST - Shifting power between the CPU, GPU, and GPU memory

12:18PM EST - Per-frame power management

12:18PM EST - WhisperMode 2.0: acoustic control for gaming laptops. Re-engineered from the ground up

12:19PM EST - PCI-Express Resizable BAR support is coming as well

12:19PM EST - (This is the secret sauce behind AMD's Smart Access Memory tech)

12:19PM EST - (It remains to be seen if it will have the same performance boost for NVIDIA's architectures, however)

12:20PM EST - Finally, NVIDIA is lumping DLSS into their Max-Q technologies

12:21PM EST - RTX 3060 is coming to laptops

12:21PM EST - Interestingly, NVIDIA is opting to compare it to the PS5, where they have it listed as 1.3x faster

12:21PM EST - RTX 3060 laptops will be starting at $999

12:21PM EST - RTX 3070 laptops as well. These are aimed at 1440p gaming

12:22PM EST - 1.5x faster than the RTX 2070

12:22PM EST - And RTX 3080 laptops with up to 16GB of VRAM, starting at $1999

12:22PM EST - Half of the 30 series laptops will offer 240Hz or higher refresh rates

12:23PM EST - NVIDIA's Studio program for workstation laptop design and drivers continues on strong

12:25PM EST - "Today we're introducing over 70 laptops from every OEM"

12:25PM EST - Laptops available starting January 26th, with prices starting at $999 (RTX 3060)

12:26PM EST - (Alas, poor Cyberpunk)

12:26PM EST - (It'll still sell a million video cards, though)

12:26PM EST - "RTX is the new standard, and momentum continues to grow"

12:27PM EST - One more thing

12:27PM EST - Rolling a video of MS Flight Sim 2020 being played on a simulator rig

12:28PM EST - A rather detailed rig, at that

12:29PM EST - Powered by a Razer Blade 15 laptop with an RTX 3080, as it turns out

12:29PM EST - And that's a wrap. Off to chase down more details about NVIDIA's new hardware!