Of course, he was exaggerating a bit: This year’s Windows machine clearly won’t be launching a spinning jenny to help you with your rustic crochet hobby (yet). Still, Houng was adamant that the RTX Spark would be able to manage “every application that Windows runs.” Nvidia CEO shows off running games on these systems platform, such as forza horizon 6 And 007 first lightBut it was impossible to tell across the auditorium how well they were actually performing.
Huang’s claims, if true, would be significant. Nvidia’s new, seemingly powerful processors—co-designed with MediaTek—are based on ARM architecture. For years, ARM on PCs seemed like an unrealistic dream, given the huge task of translating decades of software and drivers from the centuries-old x86 architecture. And suddenly, Nvidia appears and promises that everything will fall into place like rain.
But Huang’s keynote, somewhat conveniently, did not delve deeper into the extent to which ARM chips need to rely on emulation. Emulators eat up CPU headroom and perform worse than your normal display. So I hope Nvidia can forgive me for suspecting I was fully prepared for a substandard gaming experience when I walked into Nvidia’s RTX Spark demo suite.
What I saw there was not flawless, nor was it the finished product. But the demo left me feeling more curiosity than skepticism, which feels like – dare I say it? – A promising sign.
In the gaming room, four preproduction Microsoft Surface Ultra PCs were spinning recent titles Microsoft Prism via the x86 emulator, which simulates the behavior The software featured specific Intel and AMD chips. i started playing PragmataA game that can look very atmospheric when you take its ray-traced lighting to its extreme. The game was running at around 60 fps, and its smoothness impressed me; It ran with no stuttering, weird graphics artifacts, or visible hiccups. This is important to have an exemplary title.
There are some caveats here. The system was using Nvidia’s DLSS 4.5 upscaling to boost frame rates by rendering the game at a lower resolution. Nvidia was also adamant that it couldn’t reveal graphics settings because the hardware and software were still incomplete ahead of the RTX Spark laptop’s vague release date. And this was certainly a snippet of a single game, which won’t be indicative of how the thousands of available games will run with ARM builds.
I also played for several minutes alan wake iiWhich Nvidia told me was running with path tracing enabled, which was producing really great reflections and environmental lighting. The game was also taking advantage of Nvidia’s newly announced DLSS 4.5 ray reconstruction model, which reduces ghosting and brings back environmental detail at the expense of frame rate. It was looking beautiful. Without the need for frame generation to artificially smooth things, what I played looked great.
And there’s still a lot of work left when it comes to the in-game experience. Nvidia is essentially combining brute-force GPU power to overcome emulation bottlenecks and working with developers and publishers for compatibility. These laptops will support anti-cheat systems for multiplayer titles Fortnite, valiant, And League of Legends. RTX Spark is believed to be supported by publishers like Remedy Entertainment Control And alan wake ii fame) and riot games. The big attraction is Xbox, which will reportedly support Nvidia’s CPUs with future titles. Nvidia also claimed that it is working on support for major anti-cheat software like Denuvo and BattleEye.
Under the hood, Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU is also in the works. The RTX Spark – which Jensen also referred to by its internal designation of N1X in a Q&A with journalists – uses 6,144 CUDA cores, which is the same as the RTX 5070. This does not mean, however, that this chip will deliver RTX 5070 desktop performance. The thermal design power (TDP) of a laptop of this size cannot provide that. However, Microsoft hasn’t disclosed the TDP of its laptops – in fact, none of the OEMs making Spark PCs like MSI, HP, or Asus have disclosed much that would speak to exact performance.
These devices also sport up to 128 GB of integrated memory, which is like RAM with a shared memory pool between components to boost graphics performance when needed. This means these PCs won’t be as upgradeable as many might hope, although at least the Surface Ultra has a single lane for a replaceable SSD.
Nvidia also claims that the RTX Spark devices will provide “all-day battery,” which could mean a lot of things depending on your use case and probably doesn’t apply if you’re gaming. It would be on par with the myriad gaming-capable laptops I’ve tested with Nvidia’s different GPUs, but Nvidia hasn’t provided enough details about its chip to be sure.
Peter David, Microsoft’s lead program manager, told Gizmodo that Microsoft has gone the extra mile with Nvidia’s chip. “Not all ARM cores are the same,” he said. “We made very specific adaptations to [RTX Spark architecture] To take advantage of the emulator and to take advantage of the emulator core. He further added that Windows Maker also put more time into the emulator to improve the 1% less, which may explain why I didn’t see stuttering in any of my demos.
It’s the fine-tuning of the emulator that can make or break the RTX Spark. SolidWorks, a 3D design software running on ARM emulation, lets me rotate and expand the car model without any slowdown or lag. In addition to my gaming demo, I worked with a prototype Surface Ultra running Adobe Premiere and AI agents in an OpenGL environment. Again, we don’t know how it will perform with the entire gamut of x86-exclusive software. There’s more reason to be optimistic here than other ARM on PC projects.
Once the gaming demo was complete, I took a look at other models coming this fall, including the Surface Ultra and its ultra-premium chassis. It includes an extra-large cooling solution, whose fans have been optimized not to sound like a jet engine at full speed. It looks like Microsoft is positioning its Ultra device as a serious MacBook Pro competitor, or, at the very least, something that can tempt potential MacBook Pro M5 Max buyers. The development community is full of gamers, and despite Apple’s efforts and pleading from developers, MacBooks are still worse for gaming than PCs. Looking at the way emulation is shaping up, it looks like ARM PCs will maintain their lead this cycle.
Meanwhile, Asus is producing ProArt P14 and P16 models with tandem OLED displays for better brightness and contrast. HP is pushing the OmniBook Ultra with an additional thermal shelf for better cooling. MSI is expanding its Prestige 14 lineup with the Prestige N16 Flip AI, a 2-in-1 with a built-in stylus. The laptop manufacturer emphasizes that the stylus will stick to the laptop without any issues, which was not the case with the latest Prestige 14.
ARM itself is not everything. Intel’s Panther Lake chips have proven to be very capable of x86 gaming at low resolutions around 1080p. AMD has the latest Gorgon Halo chips built for heavy GPU workloads. I don’t need a crystal ball to guess that RTX Spark PCs will be very, very expensive – they’re built for people who need a mobile workstation and don’t mind paying – so x86 isn’t going away.
The potentially more interesting question here is how Intel and AMD will compete with Nvidia in the gaming-capable chip market. For this reason, it’s a good thing for the entire market that the RTX Spark exists – but Huang has to let the chip do the talking for once.
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