If you've purchased a laptop or tablet with an AMD Ryzen chip inside, there's a performance tweak you absolutely need to know about. Savvy gamers know instinctively that you can boost your game's frame rate by lowering the resolution or the visual quality, or by making an adjustment to the Windows power-performance slider. But the Ryzen AI Max is a new kind of device: a killer mobile processor that can run modern games at elevated frame rates, and serve as an AI powerhouse. A simple adjustment of the Ryzen AI Max's unified frame buffer, or available graphics memory. While it's a simple fix, in my tests, it made an enormous difference: up to a 60 percent performance boost in some cases.

There was no question that NVIDIA's RTX 5000 GPUs would be one of the biggest stories at CES 2025, and I figured Intel and AMD to arrive with some new hardware of their own. But I didn't expect that each of these companies would, in their own way, be putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to power for their chip designs. After all, we've spent the last few years covering AI PC CPUs that was targeting efficiency more than raw performance. While NVIDIA RTX 5000 GPUs seem to deliver the performance leap we expected over its 2022-era cards, AMD is also redefining what's possible for mobile workstations with its Ryzen AI Max chips, which combine powerful graphics with gobs of integrated memory. Intel isn't sitting still either -- it's finally moving Arrow Lake into the high-performance and gaming arena with its Core Ultra 200HX chips, which can reach up to 24 cores and 5.5GHz speeds.

AMD is targeting both low-end and high-end AI PCs at CES 2025. The company unveiled a new family of Ryzen AI Max chips meant for "halo" Copilot AI PCs, which will sit above existing Ryzen AI 9 systems. Clearly, AMD wants AI PC options for everyone. To its credit, AMD's Ryzen AI Max chips seem like powerhouses. They feature up to 16 Zen 5 performance cores, 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units and 50 TOPS of AI performance with AMD"s XDNA 2 NPU.