The best reason to care about Nvidia’s RTX Spark: ‘everything’ will run on Arm
An Nvidia RTX Spark chip aboard an Asus laptop motherboard. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft released an Nvidia-powered Windows PC that would become one of the greatest tech flops in modern history. The original Microsoft Surface, which ran a stripped-down version of Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip, bombed so hard that Microsoft had to write off $900 million in…
Key points
- Nvidia launches its first RTX Spark laptops on Friday, October 16th, bringing Arm-powered Windows 11 PCs.
- Nvidia says the chip runs all apps and games, with Microsoft's Prism emulator handling older x86 software.
- Early tests show smooth 1080p gaming but some CPU-limited titles struggle to reach 30fps.
Nvidia is reintroducing its Arm-based chip to Windows PCs with the first RTX Spark laptops launching this Friday, October 16th. The move comes 14 years after Microsoft's original Surface, which used an Nvidia Tegra chip and failed so badly that Microsoft wrote off $900 million in inventory because the Arm chip couldn't run existing Windows apps.
Nvidia says the new RTX Spark laptops will run everything, including Adobe, Office, Blender, and games that require kernel-level anti-cheat. "All your apps, all your games, everything's going to run great on Spark," Nvidia senior director of products Justin Walker told journalists last week.
How the chip works
The RTX Spark is not a brand-new chip; it is the same one Nvidia put in mini desktops for AI developers a year ago. Those boxes ran Linux, but the new laptops run full Windows 11 with Microsoft's Prism emulator, which converts x86 instructions to Arm in real time.
Nvidia is following Apple's 2020 move to Arm with Rosetta 2 and Qualcomm's 2024 Windows on Arm launch. Nvidia claims its chip has more graphics horsepower than a Steam Deck or Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, similar to a midrange RTX 5060 laptop GPU.
All your apps, all your games, everything's going to run great on Spark
— Justin Walker
Gaming performance and price
Early tests show smooth 1080p performance in games like Cyberpunk 2077, with options to stretch to higher resolutions using DLSS. However, some CPU-limited games run slower because of Prism translation; colleagues could not exceed 30fps in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered or Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Nvidia says it supports anti-cheat for Fortnite, Roblox, Rust, Rainbow Six Siege, and MapleStory, with more coming later. The laptops are expensive: the Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,600 with 24GB of memory and rises to $5,900 for 128GB of unified memory.
