CES 2026 In Assessment: Quick on Gaming {Hardware}, Huge on TVs and Screens

At the tip of its week scouring the Consumer Electronics Show 2026 present ground, the Digital Foundry crew has returned to evaluate its Las Vegas conference findings, cataloguing quite a lot of new applied sciences that vary from intriguing to overwhelming.

We’ve already coated displays, demos, and interviews with three of the most important gamers in PC and gaming know-how at CES, together with Nvidia, AMD and Intel. Additional articles dig additional into impressions of Nvidia’s newly introduced DLSS 4.5 applied sciences and Intel’s spectacular Panther Lake line of mobile-minded programs – which, primarily based on our on-site captures, brings built-in graphics efficiency into the lower-end desktop house.

Some of our findings will be discovered under for simple consumption. Our panel’s longer dialog about CES 2026 is embedded above and contains extra anecdotal impressions – together with peculiar units like articulated robots and Razer’s Project AVA “hologram” standee in your house or workplace desk.

New monitor- and TV-specific buzzwords floated round CES 2026, and one of many massive ones we noticed from competing distributors had various names, together with RGB MiniLED and MicroRGB, with the identical implementation. The core concept: a MiniLED panel with an RGB backlight. This issues as a result of – at the least in take a look at patterns we noticed with our personal eyes – colour-matched backlighting can ship way more vibrant color info in a display screen’s pixels.

We do not know the way real-world content material, with restricted numbers of dimming zones, could examine on a saturation and depth degree, however ideally, the idea will ship one thing approaching full BT.2020 color presentation.

HDMI 2.2 commonplace cables, aka HDMI “Ultra96” cables, lastly debuted at CES 2026, and because the HDMI Forum introduced final yr, this new cable commonplace will double efficient bandwidth above the present HDMI 2.1b commonplace, from 48Gbps to 96Gbps. As this even exceeds the bandwidth of DirectPort 2.1, this is a perfect improve not only for arguably unattainable 10K decision TVs but in addition to drive increased frame-rates and richer color and luminance information streams.

Chroma sub-sampling is an unlucky compromise to push HDR and Dolby Vision metadata at increased resolutions and frame-rates on PCs through all present requirements, so we’re happy to see this enhance – although, sadly, this solely got here within the type of new cables at CES, not HDMI 2.2-compatible shows. And we’re not assured that we’ll see HDMI 2.2 panels anytime quickly.

CES 2025 had a noticeable emphasis on 4K 240Hz screens, and that product class’s return to CES 2026 solely had one notably noticeable improve, as demonstrated by Asus: a trademarked “BlackShield” coating that we are able to verify captures fewer diffuse reflections from close by lighting and thus delivers richer distinction ratios and color presentation.

However, we’re unsure how a lot of a distinction the coating makes for common house lighting, versus the well-lit environs of a conference corridor – and the QD-OLED screens we noticed with this coating nonetheless suffered from colour-fringing.

Other monitor demonstrations have been extra disappointing. Our CES attendees seen colour-fringing on a brand new “RGB OLED” panel from LG – a designation that, in response to LG, ought to cut back the problem of colour-fringing. Also at LG’s sales space, the corporate demonstrated a multi-monitor setup, with three 5Kx2K panels hooked up to a simulation driving rig, the place the mixed pixel decision was so massive that the racing sport in query maxed out at an obvious 40fps.

One of the DF workforce’s extra placing takeaways got here from a PC sport working at AMD’s sales space, Crimson Desert, that ran on a system with a brand-new Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU and a RX 9070XT GPU. This was our first time to get a superb have a look at the primary new sport from South Korean studio Pearl Abyss since its launch of the 2017 MMO Black Desert, and it seems to supercharge that sport’s third-person fight with additional upgrades to its in-house engine, BlackArea.

A rep for the sport described the ultimate tech we should always count on when Crimson Desert launches on March nineteenth, together with diffuse and specular path-traced international illumination, far-stretching level-of-detail (LOD) geometry, ray-traced reflections and “local RT lights” – although we’re not sure whether or not this phrase from AMD’s advertising and marketing workforce refers to shadows or direct lighting. The demo we noticed ran at full 2160p decision with an obvious TAA remedy at roughly 40-50fps, and this months-old construct didn’t embody the ultimate sport’s marketed full help for the complete FSR Redstone characteristic suite, together with MLFG and ray regeneration.

We have questions on a number of the promised tech – notably path traced lighting – and can make sure to take a firmer have a look at Crimson Desert’s full characteristic set when the sport launches in roughly two months.