RTX Spark: Nvidia Builds a Viable Arm-Based Gaming Laptop, but Not One I'd Recommend Buying Just for PC Gaming.

Performance is there and the experience is excellent, but compared with dedicated gaming laptops, the price is downright punishing.

The performance is there, the experience is great, but the price is quite punishing when you compare it to gaming laptops.

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Well, here it is, Nvidia's integrated silicon, the RTX Spark. It's an SoC that's being touted as the do-it-all chip. A processor that can be all things to all people. It's a maker chip, an AI lover chip, and a gamer chip.

But all three of those types have one thing in common: they have to be pretty good, because it's also an expensive chip. I talked about it when the pricing was first revealed last week, while I was at the launch event for this Windows-based technology. Even the cheapest RTX Spark machines out there will cost $2,700, and that only gets you weaker cores, 24GB of integrated memory, and a 512GB SSD.

It's certainly a limitation, but it's entirely to be expected at a time when all things PC are ridiculously expensive, especially devices that require massive amounts of memory to perform their primary function. Let's be honest here, it's artificial intelligence.

RTX Spark's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) is perfectly suited to provide large amounts of memory for system resources, as well as the ability to change it. To support the GPU when breaking local AI workloads that fill the GPU's memory pool. It's a great time for Nvidia to release something like this, as local AI is set to pick up a bit in popularity (especially when cloud services start charging real money for their services), but it's the worst time because this kind of memory-heavy hardware is expensive.

But here it is in front of me, an RTX Spark laptop that looks for all the world like the slim, MacBook-like Razer Blade machines I've loved for years. But it's not a Blade, it's an Asus ProArt P16, and it's stunning. Slimmer than the Zephyrus G16 with a sleek aluminum body and a 64GB 20-core RTX Spark N1X chip inside.

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I got my greasy mitts on RTX Spark laptops running, what else, games at Gamescom 2026—and there's a couple I really want to take home.

I've only been using it for a short time, and there's so much going on and so much will change over the next few months that I'm really just going to scratch the surface here. But today I'm going to explore the game's architecture and performance, and maybe later tell you a little about my adventures in Agent AI as a palate cleanser.

However, even having spent less than a week with the RTX Spark as a daily driver, I think I can tell right off the bat that this isn't a platform I can really recommend to casual PC gamers. It's too expensive and the gaming laptops currently in the market serve us better. But, it's an absolutely fascinating and truly impressive platform, and could be a glimpse into the future of PCs and laptops in general.

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I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. The promise of an all-Nvidia gaming laptop has been a tempting prospect for years. Even before the company decided to buy Arm itself, there were rumors of an SoC that would combine Arm cores with Nvidia's powerful GPU silicon.

AMD has had their own APUs for the longest time, and Intel has been running all aspects of laptops since the dark ages. So it's no surprise that Nvidia wanted a piece of that pie.

And with Qualcomm taking the early success of Windows on the arm with its Snapdragon Elite and Plus chips, allowing the operating system to grow around the initial hiccups, it's time for Nvidia's platform to come to fruition.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) gaming laptop review.

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Now we know the price of the new RTX Spark laptops and they are as expensive as I'm sure you feared.

In fact, there is no more Windows-on-Arm, as Microsoft is dropping the extension and just calling it Windows, because Microsoft is versatile here too. To be honest, I think it's largely due to the push for local AI and the fact that Linux in general is where it lives right now - including DGX Spark, which was the first desktop home of the N1X chip running RTX Spark. But Microsoft is helping out on the gaming front as well, making the Prism emulation layer more robust on the Arm platform and also pledging to bring all the anti-cheat programs on top of those that Linux doesn't already have.

Although Epic is currently working on the Linux side.

The Nvidia RTX Spark SoC looks fairly ready-made with all the good things Nvidia has to offer, along with plenty of Arm cores. All of this is packaged alongside 128GB of integrated LPDDR5X-9400 memory.

First, the GPU side. That's exactly what we've already seen drop on the DGX Spark device, which launched around this time last year. It is an RTX Blackwell based chip that has 6144 CUDA cores in 48 SMS. In fact, this is the same configuration as the RTX 5070 GP U desktop core, the GB205, albeit with a lower amount of L2 cache and a necessarily slower clock speed.

This is one of the reasons why Nvidia lowers performance expectations despite having the same configuration as the desktop RTX 5070. This suggests that it is more like the performance of the mobile RTX 5070 in actual gaming performance.

Apart from the cache difference and the general difference in the attached system memory (LPDDR5X not GDDR7), we can assume that the Blackwell SM layout is the same as it has been since the architecture was first launched. There are still 128 CUDA cores per SM, and I expect 192 5th gen Tensor cores and 48 4th gen RT cores, as in the DGX Spark chip.

The 256-bit memory interface and slower memory means you get 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth, compared to the 672 GB/s that the RTX 5070 desktop configuration can deliver on its 192-bit bus. But because of the platform the RTX Spark sits on, the Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) it's surrounded by, and the CPU it comes with, these comparisons are a bit apples to oranges.

Although Nvidia calls it a Grace CPU and it's custom-built with MediaTek, it still uses a few off-the-shelf Arm cores. But honestly, a lot of them. There are 10 "performance" Arm Cortex-X925 cores and 10 "efficient" Arm Cortex-A725 cores, marking the peak of Arm's 2024 lineup.

However, as far as we know, no additional work has been done with these cores to help give the emulation boost necessary to run the x86-centric workloads that are headed their way. That's a step Apple has taken with its arm cores, making sure they're designed to take care of them from the start. Things like that.

There's also a second, scaled-down RTX Spark SoC. It comes with 5120 CUDA cores at 40 SM (so a proportional reduction in Tensor cores and RT cores as well) and with 18 Arm CPU cores, which means one core less than each of the efficient and efficient cores.

Testing the relative game performance of different laptops in several games.

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Black Myth: Wukong Benchmark Tool (1080p High) Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)

Relative game performance test in several games at the native resolution of the laptop screen.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native Res. RT Ultra) Baldur's Gate 3 (Native Res. Ultra) Black Myth: Wukong Benchmark Tool (Native Res. High) Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native Res. Ultra)

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native Resolution RT Ultra + Upscaling (Quality), 2x FG) Black Legend: Wukong Benchmark (Native Ver. High + Upscaling (Quality, 67%))

The performance I've gotten from this slim little gaming laptop has been impressive. Especially when you consider the power it draws to be very close (and sometimes similar) to the performance of gaming laptops with 115W GPUs alone.

The Metro Exodus Enhanced benchmark is one we consistently use for game performance benchmarks, as we can easily loop tests to provide a longer-term understanding of what's happening in a game session. And looking at the RTX Spark numbers this Asus ProArt P16 laptop is showing, you can see that this is an efficient piece of silicon.

We ran a triple loop of the Metro Exodus Enhanced benchmark at high settings at 1080p, and while the RTX Spark was noticeably slower than the other RTX 5070 systems I'm comparing it to, it runs at a fraction of the power. At 75fps, the chip lags behind the Blade 14's 115W RTX 5070 at 84fps, but the chip runs roughly 700MHz slower, drawing an average of 43W over that time compared to the Razer Laptop's 97W.

Measuring the relative performance of different laptop chips in terms of power and heat.