I expected Nvidia's keynote to leave out gaming entirely, but the RTX Spark's purported 5070-like performance is a pleasant surprise

It's not lost on me that Nvidia isn't a primarily gaming-focused company anymore. On the off-chance you've been living under a cool mossy rock for the last few years, Nvidia were once primarily known for their powerful graphics cards, but are now very much all-in on AI.

Why? Well, let me put it this way: during the first quarter of 2026, the data centre segment of Nvidia's business raked in $75.2 billion alone. Supplying the AI industry with hardware has proven incredibly lucrative for the company, leading Nvidia to become the world's first $5 trillion company last year.

So, imagine my surprise when at this year's Computex, Nvidia finally unveiled the much-leaked RTX Spark. Billed as a "superchip," machine learning applications definitely feature in the elevator pitch—that's hardly surprising because, as our Jeremy so expertly explains, it is "basically a rebadge of the GB10 superchip in the DGX Spark desktop AI box that it launched in October last year."

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However, the full hardware sell isn't only geared towards AI agents but flesh and blood gamers too, promising 100 fps at 1440p in the latest games. In other words, we could be looking at performance comparable to the RTX 5070 GPU from a mobile SoC.

The company is also apparently working with all the anti-cheat vendors to make competitive games work on RTX Spark, going as far as to tell us, "We are working closely with game developers to ensure all the top games run great." It's such a simple thing, but it sure is nice to hear Nvidia talk about gaming again.

(Image credit: I-Hwa Cheng / AFP via Getty Images)

As someone who desperately tried to keep a bulky Acer Aspire 5755 G alive for well over a decade, I'm also definitely intrigued by what the RTX Spark could offer laptop gamers.

Now, if you spend any amount of time pining after the best gaming laptops like I do, you'll know you can already get mobile RTX 5070 GPUs. Unfortunately, this form factor often has some significant drawbacks. Basically, if the laptop chassis ain't bulky, it will be hot, and either way under load the fan will likely sound like it's threatening to take off.

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On top of that, the battery life may be somewhat lacking, giving you a scant few hours of unplugged gaming. That all goes without saying anything about the price, but I'll get into why I'm doubting RTX Spark machines will save our wallets from devastation a little later.

On the subject of practical matters, the pre-release RTX Spark machines we've seen so far have all been pretty sleek. I will also take a gaming battery life that Nvidia purports to be "better than anything you've seen before on RTX laptops."

(Image credit: Nvidia)

That said, it definitely doesn't hurt to maintain some showfloor scepticism for hardware hypemen. Firstly, it's worth noting that the aforementioned RTX 5070-level performance is based on an early specs role call, which lists 'up to' 20 Grace CPU cores, 6144 RTX Blackwell GPU cores, and 128 GB of unified LPDDR5x memory.

To dissect the use of 'up to', the RTX Spark isn't just a single laptop processor but a full lineup of notebook SoCs that we'll start seeing more of later this year. Mark Aevermann, the consumer product marketing lead of RTX Spark, told our Dave that over time we will eventually see about "30 laptops and over ten or so desktops," all attacking different price points.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Memory configurations will range from 16 GB to 128 GB, and based on that detail alone I'm expecting most RTX Spark machines to be too rich for my blood. Back in the day, my Acer Aspire 5755 G cost me a little over £700—in light of the memory supply crisis, I would be extremely surprised if any RTX Spark machines rock up around that price point.

But perhaps I could be persuaded to save my pennies. Our Dave went hands-on with a native Arm build of Alan Wake 2 on a pre-release version of the Surface Laptop Ultra, hardware that Microsoft has apparently been working on with Nvidia for about three years. Though a very tightly controlled demo on the showfloor at Computex, Dave highlights "This is still a DirectX 12 game, with a native Arm port running smoothly on this thin-and-light gaming laptop without blowing a gale out the back."

(Image credit: Future)

Now, not every studio can invest the resources to create a native Arm build, so in those instances there's Prism emulation. Jo Vivoli, the senior manager in Nvidia's tech marketing team, told Dave, "If you're a developer and your game is running through an emulator, we're going to work with you to make sure it's a good experience. If you want to make a native Arm build, we're going to work with you to make sure it's a good experience."

Another Microsoft representative also said "We've been looking at the 200 largest, most used creative applications, most used games and we're on track to have those working in time for launch."

(Image credit: Nvidia)

That sort of support represents a huge amount of investment in Nvidia's new PC platform from multiple partners. We already know the likes of MediaTek, Microsoft, and MSI (mm-hm), have been working with Nvidia on RTX Spark machines for years now—once the ball drops later this year, it will get rolling with a fair bit of momentum behind it. As exciting as all of that is though, I wouldn't be surprised if the price of an RTX Spark machine leaves many PC Gamers in the dust.

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