The Best Reason to Care About Nvidia's RTX Spark: 'Everything' Will Run on Arm
Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft released a Windows PC powered by Nvidia that became one of the biggest technology failures in modern history. Microsoft's original Surface, which ran a version of Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip, was so harshly panned that Microsoft had to write off $900 million in inventory. The problem was […]
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The company claims that the new Nvidia laptops will run all your programs and games.
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An Nvidia RTX Spark chip on an Asus laptop motherboard. | Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
He is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge, which covers gadgets, games and toys. He spent 15 years editing publications such as CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft released an Nvidia-powered Windows PC that would become one of the biggest technology failures in modern history. Microsoft's original Surface, which ran a version of Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip, bombed so badly that Microsoft had to write down $900 million in inventory.
The problem was that Nvidia's Arm chip couldn't run existing Windows applications. Buyers had to leave their old plans behind.
This Friday, October 16, Nvidia will once again be at the heart of Arm-powered Windows PCs with the first wave of RTX Spark laptops. But now, the company says, they will implement everything. Adobe. office mixer Even games that require anti-cheat at the kernel level.
"All your apps, all your games, everything runs great on Spark," Nvidia chief product officer Justin Walker told reporters last week.
I'm willing to bet most Verge readers won't shell out $7,000 for an unproven local AI workstation with 128GB of RAM. Even if you did, I'm not sure you'd appreciate the trade-offs of a thin laptop using its GPU to generate "free" tokens locally. As Tom points out, it's much slower than AI in the cloud.
How Windows is optimized for Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops
But it's hard not to be excited for a future where Arm chips can do all the other things we've come to expect from Windows PCs.
Nvidia re-introduced the RTX Spark chip at its Editor's Day. Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
Nvidia held an editor day in San Francisco last week to play up the idea that RTX Spark laptops could be anything. Gamers, creators, developers, and AI users each have their own slides to explain the benefits of the chip.
Finally, Nvidia provided you with laptops to review, and I'm writing this story on one. After a few days, I found it to be largely indistinguishable from a traditional Windows machine, though we'll have more thoughts on the pros, cons, and basic quirks tomorrow when the full embargo is lifted.
The RTX Spark superchip isn't a brand new piece of silicon — it's the same chip the company put into a mini desktop for AI developers a year ago. But those boxes ran Linux. This one runs full Windows 11, with Microsoft's Prism emulator running legacy Windows apps and games on the Arm chip.
Nvidia isn't the first company to bet on developing PC software on a platform it wasn't originally designed for. As of 2020, Apple has transitioned all of its computers from Intel's x86 chips to its own Arm-based silicon with the help of the Rosetta 2 emulator. In 2022, Valve's SteamOS proved the potential of Windows games on Linux and then Arm, with the help of the Linux community. And in 2024, the Prism simulator made its debut when Qualcomm launched the first well-received Windows on Arm machines, including the seventh edition of Microsoft's Surface Laptop.
But Nvidia wants to go beyond them all in the field of artificial intelligence and gaming.
Although Qualcomm initially suggested that most games should only work on Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, it was a rude awakening. Some games were completely buggy, some struggled, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips were initially aimed at relatively low-end games. Many of the world's biggest multiplayer games, such as Fortnite, won't run on Qualcomm or SteamOS devices because their anti-cheat software is incompatible with Arm and Linux, respectively.
Nvidia's RTX Spark has significantly more graphics power than the Steam Deck or the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, though in our early tests it felt more like a mid-range laptop discrete GPU like the RTX 5060, and Nvidia says it's working with a list of gaming companies it's practically working to tackle.
The various anti-cheat software currently used in Fortnite, Roblox, Rust, Rainbow Six Siege and MapleStory – all of which have been incompatible with Valve's SteamOS operating system – and Nvidia says the various anti-cheat software that protects Call of Duty, PUBG, League of Legends, Valorant, Apex Legends, Battlefield and many EA Sports titles will be officially released for the RTX Spark later.
The reality is that some "CPU-limited" games run slower because Microsoft's Prism has to convert its x86 instructions to Arm instructions in real-time, adding lag to everything. Try as I might, my colleague Tom Warren couldn't get Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered to run above 30fps, probably because that game is fairly CPU-limited. And when he tried Assassin's Creed Shadows, my colleague Antonio Di Benedetto couldn't break 30fps there either — a MacBook Pro M5 Max ran the game twice as fast.
DLSS 5 also runs on the RTX Spark, now that Nvidia has made it more efficient – and it doesn't look too bad here that it's been reduced now. Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
But most games are still GPU-limited — and Nvidia's Blackwell GPU inside the RTX Spark is the same Blackwell you'd find in traditional laptops, no translation needed. So far, we've seen smooth 1080p performance in games like Cyberpunk 2077, and we've found that you can bump it up to these laptops' native 1800p or 2180p resolutions if you want to satisfy low or medium settings with plenty of DLSS upscaling.
(Officially, Nvidia claims you can play 007 First Light, Cyberpunk, Gears of War: E-Day, Doom: The Dark Ages, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Pragmata at 135 fps at 1440p, but that equates to DLSS and frame generation 3, meaning two "fake" frames for every real frame. These results may also use Nvidia's faster new frame generation model with reduced image quality.)
Nvidia says you can trade off a bit of image quality with more smoothing with a new generation frame model. Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
In a normal year, when Nvidia was a normal company, it was enough for RTX Spark laptops to "just work". Instead, Nvidia is on top of the world, raking in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits from selling gold bullion in artificial intelligence — which, in turn, has driven memory and storage prices into the stratosphere.
The bad news is that this makes RTX Spark laptops very expensive, especially if you want enough memory and GPU cores to do everything they claim. The $2,600 Surface Laptop Ultra actually starts with a stripped-down Nvidia N1X with 18 CPU cores, 5,120 GPU cores, and 24GB of memory. For the full complement of 20 CPU cores and 6,144 GPU cores, pay $3,700 and up to $5,900 if you want 128GB of integrated memory to fit larger local AI models.
The good news is that Windows PC makers, including Microsoft, are more boldly pursuing MacBook Pro quality now that they can justify asking so much money. And by the time the rest of us can afford an Nvidia device—Nvidia says the Spark is a family of products with cheaper versions in the works—maybe the initial growing pains will be over.
The best news is that the future Nvidia is building is not Nvidia's alone. Qualcomm helped make today's Windows on Arm possible, and Nvidia should help make tomorrow's Qualcomm machines better, too.
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