NVIDIA RTX Spark Shows Strong Potential, But Early Prototype Leaves Plenty Of Performance On The Table

A TechPowerUp user tested an unreleased Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra prototype with NVIDIA’s N1X/RTX Spark chip.

The hardware and build quality looked promising, and synthetic benchmarks were decent, but gaming, CUDA, and some AI tasks underperformed.

The main culprit was immature drivers and firmware, not necessarily weak silicon.

The result suggests NVIDIA’s Arm laptop chip could be competitive once the software stack matures.