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Nvidia's upcoming RTX Spark laptops and mini PCs are being designed for AI agents, software developers, and PC gamers alike. But if it's going to be a success on the gaming side, the emulation layer required to get today's games running on the system has to be as transparent, or even as invisible as possible.
But not all games are going to rely on the Prism emulation layer, as Nvidia has shared in a pre-Computex briefing that it is working with a ton of game developers and has seen "massive engagement" from them on the platform. To the point where Mark Aevermann, Nvidia's marketing lead for RTX Spark, has noted to us that engagement runs the gamut from just optimising their existing games for the Prism layer, to creating native Arm ports of their games, to wholly developing titles from scratch for Windows on Arm.
So while the emulation layer will affect the performance of the RTX Spark, meaning the full spec chip with RTX 5070-level GPU chops will have its frame rate impacted by needing to run x86 games through the Prism emulation layer, the future seems to be beyond optimisation and into actual native Arm versions of games and apps.
Nvidia hasn't given any specifics about what the impact of Prism on comparative gaming performance is going to be like up against x86 devices. But what Aevermann has said is that there's a good chance that gaming won't be seriously affected.
"Depending on the exact example [RTX Spark] can be faster than an RTX 5070, slower than or equal to a 5070... So depending on where workloads have more constraints you'll see different performance levels.
"The way to think about that, for things that are heavily GPU bound emulation won't really have much of an effect. For compute-heavy portions of appplications, or games that are GPU bound, you wouldn't expect much effect to be there. So in that way you'd expect it to be comparable or better than [an RTX 5070]."
Aevermann noted that Nvidia's been working with Microsoft on this ecosystem for years, and architected the RTX Spark knowing how Prism works. So with Nvidia's work with Microsoft and game developers on making emulation work well with the hardware, and working with devs to create ports and native versions of games, the potential for gaming on Arm looks good.
"At the end of the day we just want to ensure all the top games run and run great on RTX Spark," says Aevermann. "So we're going up each and every developers' software stack to make that vision come true."
Poor Linux.
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