{"id":8748,"date":"2026-10-15T16:17:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T16:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=8748"},"modified":"2026-10-15T16:17:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T16:17:07","slug":"nvidia-rtx-spark-everything-runs-on-arm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=8748","title":{"rendered":"The best reason to care about Nvidia\u2019s RTX Spark: \u2018everything\u2019 will run on Arm"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft released an Nvidia-powered Windows PC that would become one of the greatest tech flops<\/a> 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 inventory<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The problem was that Nvidia\u2019s Arm chip couldn\u2019t run existing Windows apps. Buyers had to leave their legacy programs behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This Friday, October 16th, 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\u2019ll run everything<\/em>. Adobe. Office. Blender. Even games that require kernel-level anti-cheat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAll your apps, all your games, everything\u2019s going to run great on Spark,\u201d Nvidia senior director of products Justin Walker told journalists last week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019m willing to bet most Verge <\/em>readers don\u2019t have up to $7,000<\/a> burning a hole in their pockets for an unproven local AI workstation with 128GB of RAM. Even if you do, I\u2019m not sure you\u2019ll appreciate the tradeoffs of a thin laptop maxing out its GPU to produce \u201cfree\u201d tokens locally. As Tom notes<\/a>, it\u2019s much slower than AI in the cloud.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But it\u2019s hard not to be excited for a future where Arm chips can do all the other<\/em> things we expect of Windows PCs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Nvidia<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Nvidia<\/em> reintroduces the RTX Spark chip at its Editor\u2019s Day.<\/em><\/figcaption>Photo by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Nvidia held an Editor\u2019s Day in San Francisco last week to drive home the idea that RTX Spark laptops can be that everything. Gamers, creators, developers, and AI power users each<\/em> got their own dedicated slide deck to explain the chip\u2019s benefits.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the end, Nvidia handed out laptops for review, and I\u2019m writing this story on one right now. After several days, I\u2019m finding it mostly indistinguishable from a traditional Windows machine, though we\u2019ll have more thoughts on early pros, cons, and quirks when the full embargo lifts tomorrow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The RTX Spark \u201csuperchip\u201d isn\u2019t a brand-new piece of silicon<\/a> \u2014 it\u2019s the same chip the company put in mini desktops for AI developers<\/a> a full year ago. But those boxes ran Linux; this one runs full Windows 11, with Microsoft\u2019s Prism emulator making old Windows apps and games work on the Arm chip.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nvidia isn\u2019t the first company to make a big bet on extending PC software onto a platform it wasn\u2019t originally designed for. Starting in 2020, Apple moved all<\/em> its computers from Intel x86 chips to its own Arm-based silicon with the help of its Rosetta 2 emulator<\/a>. In 2022, Valve\u2019s SteamOS proved the potential of Windows games on Linux, and then Arm<\/a>, with the help of the Linux community. And in 2024, the Prism emulator got its first outing when Qualcomm launched the first well-received Windows on Arm machines, including the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But Nvidia wants to leapfrog them all when it comes to AI and gaming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Though Qualcomm originally suggested most games should \u201cjust work\u201d<\/a> on Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, it was a rude awakening<\/a>. Some games entirely errored out, some had hitches, and Qualcomm\u2019s Snapdragon X Elite chips were targeting relatively low-end gaming to begin with. Many of the world\u2019s biggest multiplayer games, like Fortnite<\/em>, wouldn\u2019t run on either Qualcomm or SteamOS devices because their anti-cheat software was incompatible with Arm and Linux respectively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nvidia\u2019s RTX Spark has substantially more graphics horsepower than a Steam Deck or a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, though, more akin to a midrange discrete laptop GPU like an RTX 5060 in our early tests, and Nvidia says it\u2019s working with a laundry list of game companies to enable practically every anti-cheat solution out there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nvidia says it already supports the various anti-cheat software used in Fortnite<\/em>, Roblox, Rust<\/em>, Rainbow Six Siege<\/em>, and MapleStory<\/em> \u2014 all of which have been incompatible with Valve\u2019s SteamOS \u2014 and Nvidia says the various anti-cheat software that protect Call of Duty<\/em>, PUBG<\/em>, League of Legends<\/em>, Valorant<\/em>, Apex Legends<\/em>, Battlefield<\/em>, and many EA Sports titles are all officially coming to RTX Spark later.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The reality is that some \u201cCPU-limited\u201d games will run slower because Microsoft\u2019s Prism has to convert their x86 instructions to Arm instructions in real time, adding a delay to everything. My colleague Tom Warren wasn\u2019t able to run Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered<\/em> higher than 30fps no matter what he tried, probably because that game is fairly CPU bound. And when he tried Assassin\u2019s Creed Shadows<\/em>, my colleague Antonio Di Benedetto couldn\u2019t break 30fps there either \u2014 a MacBook Pro M5 Max ran that game twice as fast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"DLSS<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But most games are still limited by their graphics instead of CPU \u2014 and the Nvidia Blackwell GPU inside the RTX Spark is the same Blackwell you\u2019ll find in a traditional laptop, no translation necessary. So far, we\u2019re seeing smooth 1080p performance in games like Cyberpunk 2077<\/em>, and we find you can stretch that to the native 1800p or 2180p resolution of these laptops if you\u2019re willing to settle for low or medium settings with a lot of DLSS upscaling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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(Officially, Nvidia claims you can play 007 First Light<\/em>, Cyberpunk<\/em>, Gears of War: E-Day<\/em>, Doom: The Dark Ages<\/em>, Naraka: Bladepoint<\/em>, and Pragmata<\/em> at 135fps at 1440p, but that\u2019s with DLSS and<\/em> 3x frame generation, meaning two \u201cfake\u201d frames for every real one. Those results might also be using Nvidia\u2019s faster new frame gen model with reduced image quality.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Nvidia<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Nvidia says you can trade a little image quality for additional smoothing with a new frame gen model.<\/em><\/figcaption>Photo by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In a normal year, back when Nvidia was a normal company, it would have been enough for RTX Spark laptops to \u201cjust work.\u201d Instead, Nvidia is on top of the world, making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit selling shovels in the AI gold rush \u2014 which, in turn, has driven the price of memory and storage<\/a> into the stratosphere.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The bad news is that makes these RTX Spark laptops very expensive, especially if you want enough memory and GPU cores to do all the things they claim. For $2,600, the Surface Laptop Ultra actually starts with a cut-down Nvidia N1X with 18 CPU cores and 5,120 GPU cores and 24GB of memory; you\u2019ll pay $3,700 for the full complement of 20 CPU cores and 6,144 GPU cores, and up to $5,900 if you want 128GB of unified memory to fit larger local AI models.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The good news is that Windows PC manufacturers, including Microsoft, seem more emboldened to go after MacBook Pro-esque quality<\/a> now that they can justify asking for so much money. And by the time the rest of us can afford an Nvidia machine \u2014 Nvidia says Spark is a family of products with lower-cost versions in the works \u2014 perhaps early growing pains will be ironed out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The best news is that the future Nvidia is building doesn\u2019t belong to Nvidia alone. Qualcomm helped make today\u2019s Windows on Arm possible<\/a>, and Nvidia should help make tomorrow\u2019s Qualcomm machines that much better too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The rising tide of Arm lifts all its boats.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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