Nvidia's RTX Spark Laptops Aim to Make Arm Windows Run 'Everything'

The original Surface, released in October 2012, ran a stripped-down version of Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip and could not run existing Windows apps. Microsoft wrote off $900 million in inventory, one of the biggest tech flops in modern history, according to The Verge. Nvidia's new effort aims to solve that compatibility problem.

Nvidia senior director of products Justin Walker told journalists last week that "all your apps, all your games, everything's going to run great on Spark." The company held an Editor's Day in San Francisco last week and gave separate presentations for gamers, creators, developers and AI power users. It also handed out laptops for review; a reporter writing on one after several days found it mostly indistinguishable from a traditional Windows machine, though full early impressions were still under embargo.

The RTX Spark "superchip" is not new silicon. It is the same chip Nvidia put in mini desktops for AI developers a year ago, but those systems ran Linux. The new laptops run full Windows 11, using Microsoft's Prism emulator to translate old Windows apps and games for the Arm chip.

Nvidia is not the first to try extending PC software to a platform it was not designed for. Apple began moving Macs from Intel x86 chips to its own Arm-based silicon in 2020 with Rosetta 2. Valve's SteamOS in 2022 showed Windows games could run on Linux, and later Arm, with help from the Linux community. In 2024, Prism debuted when Qualcomm launched the first well-received Windows on Arm machines, including the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition.

Nvidia says it wants to leapfrog those efforts in AI and gaming. Qualcomm initially suggested most games should "just work" on Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, but some games errored out or hitched, and Snapdragon X Elite chips targeted relatively low-end gaming. Many major multiplayer games, including Fortnite, would not run on Qualcomm or SteamOS devices because their anti-cheat software was incompatible with Arm or Linux.

RTX Spark has substantially more graphics horsepower than a Steam Deck or Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, according to the report, and in early tests it performed more like a midrange discrete laptop GPU such as an RTX 5060. Nvidia says it is working with many game companies to enable practically every anti-cheat solution. It says it already supports anti-cheat software used in Fortnite, Roblox, Rust, Rainbow Six Siege and MapleStory, all of which have been incompatible with Valve's SteamOS. Nvidia says anti-cheat software for Call of Duty, PUBG, League of Legends, Valorant, Apex Legends, Battlefield and many EA Sports titles is officially coming to RTX Spark later.

Some CPU-limited games will run slower because Microsoft's Prism must convert x86 instructions to Arm instructions in real time, adding delay. Tom Warren could not run Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered above 30fps regardless of settings, likely because the game is fairly CPU-bound. Antonio Di Benedetto could not break 30fps in Assassin's Creed Shadows; a MacBook Pro M5 Max ran that game twice as fast. Most games are still limited by graphics rather than CPU, and the Blackwell GPU inside RTX Spark is the same Blackwell found in a traditional laptop, with no translation needed.

The first RTX Spark laptops will be expensive and aimed partly at local AI work. The Verge noted that most readers likely do not have up to $7,000 for an unproven local AI workstation with 128GB of RAM, and that such a thin laptop maxing out its GPU to produce "free" tokens locally is much slower than cloud AI. Even so, the report said it is hard not to be excited for a future where Arm chips can do all the other things expected of Windows PCs.