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 inventory.
The problem was that Nvidia’s Arm chip couldn’t run existing Windows apps. Buyers had to leave their legacy programs behind.
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’ll run everything. Adobe. Office. Blender. Even 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.
I’m willing to bet most Verge readers don’t have up to $7,000 burning a hole in their pockets for an unproven local AI workstation with 128GB of RAM. Even if you do, I’m not sure you’ll appreciate the tradeoffs of a thin laptop maxing out its GPU to produce “free” tokens locally. As Tom notes, it’s much slower than AI in the cloud.
But it’s hard not to be excited for a future where Arm chips can do all the other things we expect of Windows PCs.
Nvidia held an Editor’s 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 got their own dedicated slide deck to explain the chip’s benefits.
At the end, Nvidia handed out laptops for review, and I’m writing this story on one right now. After several days, I’m finding it mostly indistinguishable from a traditional Windows machine, though we’ll have more thoughts on early pros, cons, and quirks when the full embargo lifts tomorrow.
The RTX Spark “superchip” isn’t a brand-new piece of silicon — it’s the same chip the company put in mini desktops for AI developers a full year ago. But those boxes ran Linux; this one runs full Windows 11, with Microsoft’s Prism emulator making old Windows apps and games work on the Arm chip.
Nvidia isn’t the first company to make a big bet on extending PC software onto a platform it wasn’t originally designed for. Starting in 2020, Apple moved all its computers from Intel x86 chips to its own Arm-based silicon with the help of its 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 emulator got its first outing when Qualcomm launched the first well-received Windows on Arm machines, including the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition.
But Nvidia wants to leapfrog them all when it comes to AI and gaming.
Though Qualcomm originally suggested most games should “just work” on Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, it was a rude awakening. Some games entirely errored out, some had hitches, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips were targeting relatively low-end gaming to begin with. Many of the world’s biggest multiplayer games, like Fortnite, wouldn’t run on either Qualcomm or SteamOS devices because their anti-cheat software was incompatible with Arm and Linux respectively.
Nvidia’s 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’s working with a laundry list of game companies to enable practically every anti-cheat solution out there.
Nvidia says it already supports the various anti-cheat software used in Fortnite, Roblox, Rust, Rainbow Six Siege, and MapleStory — all of which have been incompatible with Valve’s SteamOS — and Nvidia says the various anti-cheat software that protect Call of Duty, PUBG, League of Legends, Valorant, Apex Legends, Battlefield, and many EA Sports titles are all officially coming to RTX Spark later.
The reality is that some “CPU-limited” games will run slower because Microsoft’s Prism has to convert their x86 instructions to Arm instructions in real time, adding a delay to everything. My colleague Tom Warren wasn’t able to run Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered higher than 30fps no matter what he tried, probably because that game is fairly CPU bound. 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 that game twice as fast.
But most games are still limited by their graphics instead of CPU — and the Nvidia Blackwell GPU inside the RTX Spark is the same Blackwell you’ll find in a traditional laptop, no translation necessary. So far, we’re seeing smooth 1080p performance in games like Cyberpunk 2077, and we find you can stretch that to the native 1800p or 2180p resolution of these laptops if you’re willing to settle for low or medium settings with a lot 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 135fps at 1440p, but that’s with DLSS and 3x frame generation, meaning two “fake” frames for every real one. Those results might also be using Nvidia’s faster new frame gen model with reduced image quality.)
In a normal year, back when Nvidia was a normal company, it would have been enough for RTX Spark laptops to “just work.” Instead, Nvidia is on top of the world, making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit selling shovels in the AI gold rush — which, in turn, has driven the price of memory and storage into the stratosphere.
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’ll 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.
The good news is that Windows PC manufacturers, including Microsoft, seem more emboldened to go after MacBook Pro-esque quality now that they can justify asking for so much money. And by the time the rest of us can afford an Nvidia machine — Nvidia says Spark is a family of products with lower-cost versions in the works — perhaps early growing pains will be ironed out.
The best news is that the future Nvidia is building doesn’t belong to Nvidia alone. Qualcomm helped make today’s Windows on Arm possible, and Nvidia should help make tomorrow’s Qualcomm machines that much better too.
The rising tide of Arm lifts all its boats.