When Nvidia first revealed its new RTX Spark chip, built for graphically capable PCs, CEO Jensen Huang was his usual self, making sweeping statements that verge on ludicrous. The black-jacketed face of Nvidia proclaimed the following: “This computer literally runs everything the world has ever created, plus it runs [AI] agents.”
He was exaggerating a bit, of course: this year’s Windows machine will clearly not be starting up a spinning jenny to help with your rustic crochet hobby (yet). Still, Haung was adamant that the RTX Spark would be able to manage “every application that Windows has ever run.” The Nvidia CEO showed these systems running games on stage, such as Forza Horizon 6 and 007 First Light, but it was impossible to tell from 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 PC seemed like a pipe dream given the massive task of translating decades’ worth of software and drivers from the age-old x86 architecture. And suddenly, Nvidia shows up and promises everything will be right as rain.
But Huang’s keynote, somewhat conveniently, did not dive deeply into the extent to which ARM chips need to lean on emulation. Emulators eat up the headroom of a CPU and lead to worse performance than you would get normally. So I hope Nvidia can forgive me for feeling skeptical down to my bones, fully prepared for a subpar gaming experience, as I walked into Nvidia’s RTX Spark demo suite.
What I saw there wasn’t flawless, nor was it the finished product. But the demos did leave me feeling more intrigued than skeptical, which seems like—dare I say it?—a promising sign.
In the gaming room, four preproduction Microsoft Surface Ultra PCs were spinning up recent titles via the Microsoft Prism x86 emulator, which emulates the behavior of typical Intel and AMD chips in software. I started playing Pragmata, a game that can look very atmospheric when you push its ray-traced lighting to its extremes. The game was running at around 60 fps, and the smoothness floored me; it ran with no stuttering, odd graphics artifacts, or hitching to be seen. That’s significant for an emulated title.
There are a few 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 unfinished ahead of the RTX Spark Laptops’ vague fall release date. And this was a single slice of a single game, of course, which won’t be indicative of how the thousands and thousands of available games with ARM builds will run.
I also played several minutes of Alan Wake II, which Nvidia told me was running with path tracing enabled, producing truly spectacular reflections and environment lighting. The game was also leveraging Nvidia’s newly announced DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction model, which reduces ghosting and brings back environmental detail at the cost of frame rates. It looked beautiful. What I played looked great, without the need for frame generation to artificially smooth things out.
And there’s still a lot in the works when it comes to the in-game experience. Nvidia is essentially combining brute-force GPU power to overcome emulation hurdles and working with developers and publishers to push for compatibility. These laptops will support anti-cheat systems for multiplayer titles such as Fortnite, Valorant, and League of Legends. RTX Spark is supposed to have support from publishers like Remedy Entertainment (of Control and Alan Wake II fame) and Riot Games. The big pull is Xbox, which will supposedly support Nvidia’s CPUs with future titles. Nvidia also claimed that it’s working on support for major anti-cheat software, such as Denuvo and BattleEye.
Under the hood, Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU is also putting in the work. RTX Spark—which Jensen also referred to by its internal designation of N1X in a Q&A with journalists—uses 6,144 CUDA cores, equivalent to an RTX 5070. That doesn’t mean, of course, that this chip will deliver RTX 5070 desktop performance. The thermal design power (TDP) of a laptop of this size can’t provide that. Microsoft hasn’t revealed the TDP of its laptop, though—in fact, none of the OEMs putting out Spark PCs, such as MSI, HP, or Asus, have revealed much that would speak to precise performance.
These devices also sport up to 128GB of unified memory, which is like RAM with a shared memory pool between components to boost graphics performance when you need it. That means these PCs won’t be as upgradable as many might hope, though at least the Surface Ultra has a single lane for a replaceable SSD.
Nvidia also claims RTX Spark devices will deliver “all-day battery,” which can mean any number of things depending on your use case and likely doesn’t apply if you’re gaming. This would be on par with the innumerable gaming-capable laptops I’ve tested with Nvidia’s discrete GPUs inside, but Nvidia hasn’t provided enough details about its chip to be sure.
Microsoft’s principal program manager, Peter Dawoud, told Gizmodo that Microsoft has gone the extra mile with Nvidia’s chip. “Not all ARM cores are the same,” he said. “We did do very specific optimizations for the [RTX Spark architecture] to take advantage of the emulator and the emulator to take advantage of the cores.” He added that the Windows maker also put more time into the emulator to improve 1% lows, which may explain why I wasn’t seeing stuttering in any of my demos.
It’s that fine-tuning of that emulator that may make or break RTX Spark. SolidWorks, a 3D design software running on ARM emulation, let me rotate and expand a car model without any slowdowns or hitching. In addition to my gaming demos, I fiddled with a prototype Surface Ultra running Adobe Premiere and AI agents in OpenClaw environments. Again, we don’t know how this will perform with the full gamut of x86-exclusive software. There’s just more reason to be hopeful here than with other ARM on PC projects.
Once the gaming demos were done, I took a look at the other models set to arrive this fall, including the Surface Ultra and its ultra-premium chassis. It includes an extra-large cooling solution with fans optimized not to sound like a jet engine at full speed. Microsoft seems to be positioning its Ultra device as a serious MacBook Pro competitor, or, at least, something that could entice potential MacBook Pro M5 Max buyers. The development community is full of gamers, and despite Apple’s efforts and entreaties to devs, MacBooks are still worse for gaming than PCs. Given the way emulation is shaping up, it looks like ARM PCs will maintain their lead this cycle.
Asus, meanwhile, is producing ProArt P14 and P16 models with tandem OLED displays for better brightness and contrast. HP’s pushing an Omnibook Ultra with an added thermal shelf for enhanced cooling. MSI is augmenting its Prestige 14 lineup with the Prestige N16 Flip AI, a 2-in-1 with a built-in stylus. The laptop maker insists that the stylus will adhere to the laptop without issue, which was not the case with the most recent Prestige 14.
ARM itself isn’t the end-all be-all. Intel’s Panther Lake chips have proved very capable of x86 gaming at lower resolutions around 1080p. AMD has its latest Gorgon Halo chips built for heavy GPU workloads. I don’t need a crystal ball to predict that RTX Spark PCs will be very, very expensive—they’re built for folks who need a mobile workstation and don’t mind paying up—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 that reason, it’s a good thing for the whole market that the RTX Spark exists—but Huang needs to let the chip do the talking, for once.
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