What PC gamers should expect from CES 2015

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The year always begins the same way for the diehards of the tech world. We take down our Christmas trees. We make hopeful New Year's resolutions to eat better this year. And then we get on a plane to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, where we will immediately break those resolutions by succumbing to the allure of the Vegas buffet. There's no resisting it.

CES isn't a show about video games, but it is a show about hardware. Lots and lots of hardware. Gadgets as far as the eye can see. Accessories that, really, no one should see. There's a lot of junk. There's a lot of showcase hardware that looks cool, but will never become a real product (I'm still waiting to buy that 8K TV I saw back in 2011). Back in 1969, most of the technology at CES may have fallen under the wide field of "computers." Today, there are a lot more TVs, smartphones, and other mobile devices than the narrower niche of PCs we use to play games.

So what's here for us? What should we be excited about, looking forward to, and expecting out of CES 2015? And what are we covering?

The two major trends we expect to see a whole lot of at this year's show are VR and 4K displays.

Oculus is here doing demos, and we expect to see a whole lot of competitors popping up to grab a slice of the VR action.

Every big display manufacturer has a 4K monitor (or two, or three) to show off this year. Here's the exciting part: they're actually getting pretty affordable. They're still not cheap, of course, but in 2015, you'll be able to get a good 4K monitor for the price you would've paid for a good 1080p monitor just a year earlier.

There are also a whole bunch of curved displays out there, but we're not sold on those just yet—they may be the next 3DTV fad, doomed to die despite all the marketing muscle behind them.

We'll also be checking out SSDs and laptops and cases at this year's show, but VR and 4K monitors are the things we're most excited about.

As we cover CES this week, we'll list our news stories here. Check back regularly, or check our hardware page, for our latest news and hands-on from the show floor.

The latest from CES 2015

HP unveils 4K, 5K, curved display, and virtual reality monitors

Meet the Aventum 3, Digital Storm's new extreme gaming system

Razer takes on living room streaming with Forge TV and Turret lapboard

Razer wants to build an open-source ecosystem for virtual reality called OSVR

MSI's GT80 Titan is an Nvidia 980M SLI monster with a mechanical keyboard

Intel Broadwell CPUs arrive, but you'll have to wait for gaming chips

New Geforce GTX 965M appears in MSI's GE62 gaming laptop

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).