Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, built around Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, is pitched mainly at AI inference and content creation. But it can hold its own as a gaming machine too, according to testing from Tom's Hardware, once you work around a quirk in its screen.
The laptop ships with a 3270x2180 panel running at 120Hz, in an unusual 3:2 aspect ratio rather than the 16:9 or 16:10 shape most gaming laptops use. That high pixel count is only 14% short of a standard 16:9 4K display, which means Nvidia's DLSS upscaling tech has to work hard to hit a smooth frame rate. Worse, stretching 16:9 or 16:10 game content to fill a 3:2 screen distorts character models and objects on screen, and playing in a small windowed box instead gets tiring fast.
Microsoft does include a lower custom resolution, 1600x1024, in its display options. But Tom's Hardware found that mode actually falls short of 1920x1080 in total pixel count, leaving the image visibly soft even before DLSS gets involved.
The fix: a custom resolution
Tom's Hardware worked out that a 1764x1176 resolution comes much closer to matching the 2.07 megapixels of a standard 1080p screen while preserving the Surface's 3:2 shape. Because the Surface runs Windows on Arm, the regular Nvidia Control Panel isn't available, so the outlet built the custom resolution through the Nvidia App's Display Properties pane instead, confirming it worked as a supported 120Hz mode. Readers chasing higher detail can set up 2352x1568 for a 1440p-equivalent target the same way.
The payoff showed up in Tom's Hardware's own benchmarks of Control Resonant. At native resolution, even DLSS Ultra Performance mode and 2x frame generation only just cleared 60 FPS, with average input latency the outlet measured at an unplayable 87 milliseconds. Switch to the custom 1764x1176 resolution with DLSS Quality upscaling, and the same test produced an 83.4 FPS average with 67.8 ms of latency, according to Tom's Hardware. Pushing to 3x multi frame generation lifted that to 123 FPS while keeping latency around 71 ms.
How it stacks up against older hardware
For comparison, Tom's Hardware ran the same settings on an older 17-inch laptop pairing a Core i9-11980HK with an RTX 3080 Mobile GPU, modded to use Intel's Xe frame generation and low-latency features. That system turned in 87.1 FPS average and stronger 1% lows of 53 FPS, but it drew roughly 250 watts from the wall by the outlet's measurement, against 110 to 120 watts for the Surface Laptop Ultra. The RTX 3080 laptop and its power brick also weighed over nine pounds combined, Tom's Hardware noted, versus 5.3 pounds for the Surface and its 140W charger.
The Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark is priced at $5,899 according to Tom's Hardware's report. Whether Microsoft folds a better default resolution option into a future software update, rather than leaving gamers to dig through the Nvidia App themselves, remains to be seen.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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