Nvidia's first Windows laptop chip was built to sell AI, not frame rates. But according to PCWorld, which tested HP's Omnibook Ultra 16 running the new RTX Spark platform, it turns out to be a surprisingly capable gaming machine anyway, one that lands close to a discrete RTX 5070 graphics card in several benchmarks.
That's a notable result for an Arm chip with integrated graphics rather than a separate GPU. Nvidia had pitched the RTX Spark around "5070 level" gaming graphics before launch, and PCWorld's review says that claim holds up in practice, even if it was never the platform's main selling point. The chips are aimed first at local AI workloads, the kind of on-device processing that doesn't need a cloud server.
The numbers against a discrete RTX 5070
PCWorld ran the HP Omnibook 16 Ultra, priced at $3,199, against the MSI Stealth 16 AI+, a conventional gaming laptop with a discrete RTX 5070, a Core Ultra 9 processor and 32GB of RAM. On Geekbench 7's GPU test, the RTX Spark machine scored 113,022 against 107,232 for the MSI, a roughly 5 percent lead. On the CPU side, the Spark chip trailed in single-core performance, 2,143 to 2,560, but pulled ahead on multi-core work, 19,599 to 15,503, thanks to its 20 Grace cores.
3DMark results were mixed, PCWorld found, with the RTX Spark doing better on tests that have native Arm versions, including Steel Nomad and Port Royal. The outlet suggested the chip may lose some ground on tests where system memory and GPU memory are shared, since the integrated design doesn't get a dedicated pool the way a discrete card does.
Game compatibility, long the weak point of Arm-based Windows laptops, held up better than expected. PCWorld's testing covered titles from Space Marine II to decade-old Steam library entries, and said nearly everything ran without issue. The exceptions: the original 2011 release of Skyrim refused to launch, though the 2021 remaster worked fine, a Shadow of the Tomb Raider demo wouldn't run, and the 2010 DirectX9 title Mount & Blade: Warband ran at about a quarter of the expected frame rate.
A rough price for gamers
The catch is cost. RTX Spark laptops range from $2,600 to $7,000 at launch, PCWorld reports, which puts them roughly $1,000 above an equivalent laptop built around a discrete graphics card, and more at the high end. For anyone shopping purely for frame rates, that's a hard case to make against conventional gaming laptops.
Snapdragon-based Arm laptops have struggled for years with game compatibility, mostly limited to older 2D titles. Nvidia's entry, built with what PCWorld describes as cooperation from major publishers and promises of hundreds of compatible titles at launch, appears to have avoided that trap. The company has still kept its gaming messaging muted next to its AI pitch, which tells its own story about where it expects RTX Spark machines to actually get used.
Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra runs the same platform and has also gone through PCWorld's review process. More RTX Spark hardware from other PC makers is expected to follow as the platform rolls out through the rest of 2026.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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