When NVIDIA bought itself the 2017 International CES keynote, the expectations were through the roof. The company announced GeForce Now, a service that lets just about anyone play games on their PC without the necessary hardware, by streaming them from remote GPU farms that you rent; a new-generation NVIDIA Shield, which now comes with 4K HDR video support; NVIDIA Spot, a tiny IoT microphone that takes Google Assistant to the far reaches of your home; and some big-ticket announcements in the way of the company's self-driving cars initiative that taps into AI deep-learning.

The announcement hundreds of thousands of users thronged to Twitch for, and the announcement we in non-US time-zones stayed up late at night for, was surprisingly missing - the company did not announce the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The GTX 1080 Ti is expected to be NVIDIA's new high-end SKU positioned between the GTX 1080 and the TITAN X Pascal, bringing 4K Ultra HD gaming to even more people. Perhaps NVIDIA feels it's already dug in deep with the $599 GTX 1080 and the $1299 TITAN X Pascal, that it doesn't need a faster card that's pricier to build at this time.

The focus now shifts to the AMD camp, where later today, the company is expected to make big announcements specific to its next-generation "Vega" GPU architecture. Since AMD isn't spending nearly as much money earned from PC gamers on non-PC gaming stuff, AMD's announcements are expected to be more relevant to the people who watched NVIDIA's live-stream.