As if a 500Hz OLED wasn’t enough, Samsung has two other monitors it’s showing at CES 2025, both of which are fairly unique. The headliner is a 4K display that clocks in at 37 inches, which, even after putting my eyes on literally hundreds of gaming monitors, I’ve never encountered before.
That might not sound like a big deal, but if you look at gaming monitors above 32 inches, you start to realize that it is. When looking at a typical 16:9 display, the vast majority of monitors top out at 32 inches. Above that, you jump straight to 40 or 42 inches, with TV panels repurposed into gaming monitors — that’s the case with my own KTC G42P5.
Samsung is splitting the difference here. You can find monitors above 32 inches, but the vast majority of them are 21:9 displays. Now, gamers finally have an option when 32 inches isn’t quite big enough, but a full-on TV is too much.
The other monitor Samsung showed off is a bit different. The Odyssey G7 is a 21:9 monitor, but it comes with a 5K resolution. It’s similar to LG’s 5K2K display, which we learned about a few weeks back, but without an OLED panel under the hood.
Still, it’s quite the display. With a 5,120 x 2,160 resolution and a size of 40 inches, the Odyssey G7 clocks in at a pixel density of 139 pixels per inch. That’s high. Most monitors aim for a pixel density of 100 pixels per inch, so the Odyssey G7 is quite a bit ahead. It’s not as high as the pixel density I recently saw on the Asus ROG PG27UCDM, but it’s close.
Outside of the pixel density, the Odyssey G7 comes with a 180Hz refresh rate and a 1ms gray-to-gray response time, according to Samsung. It also comes certified with VESA’s DisplayHDR 600 and Samsung’s own HDR10+ Gaming standard, which uses dynamic metadata for HDR in games.
As is typical with Samsung’s new monitors at CES, we don’t have any pricing or release date details yet. Samsung is generally a bit slower to release new monitors compared to enthusiast-focused brands like MSI and Asus, so I suspect we’ll see the monitors toward the middle of the year. That’s just a guess right now, though.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.