- Nvidia’s RTX Spark won’t be in a laptop PC
- The new SoC is focused on laptops, according to the CEO of Nvidia
- Still feels like the Green Team is no longer focused on the players
Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip, its first complete system on a chip, landed at Computex with a bang, as the small but powerful ARM SoC looks set to compete with Apple’s M5 chip. But anyone expecting its power to come to a gaming handheld might be disappointed, and that includes me.
Speaking after Spark’s announcement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was asked if it could appear on a handheld, to which he responded: “If someone wants to do it, you know, we’ll work with them on it. But right now we’re really focused on doing something that’s so important, reinventing the PC after 40 years.”
On the one hand, this dismissive response makes some sense. While ARM is great in many ways for gaming, it does have issues as most titles are designed to run on Intel and AMD hardware. You can still play on chips like Spark with an emulation layer that translates the software to ARM hardware, but this has a serious impact on the title’s performance.
On the other hand, Spark promises impressive performance – with 20 cores, a GPU that matches the desktop RTX5070, and battery life that’s “much better than anything you’ve seen before on RTX laptops,” according to Huang, and an Nvidia executive tells us we should “expect the battery to last all day.”
With rumors of a smaller (read: more wearable-friendly), but slightly less powerful Spark on the way, I can’t help but feel like this chip could have been the light in a very dark laptop tunnel.
Please don’t ruin the technology I love.
In recent months, we have seen some very significant price increases. The most expensive models of the Lenovo Legion Go 2 handheld now cost more than two Nvidia RTX 5080 GPUs, and Valve recently increased the price of the Steam Deck OLED by almost 50%. Nintendo has already teased that the Switch 2 will get a solid price increase later this year.
The RTX Spark may not help keep costs drastically down; In fact, the laptops are rumored to cost close to $3000, while the smaller Spark would cost just under $2000, but it does boast impressive performance and comes with a much-needed increase in battery life (my Asus Rog Xbox Ally 007: First light at the same time) the cost would affect less. It’s better than getting a price increase without hardware upgrades, that’s for sure.
Some might question the appeal of a handheld if it costs as much as a full-fledged gaming laptop, but having been glued to my pair (Switch 2 and Rog Xbox Ally
It’s true that I’m not looking for a very expensive handheld, but I know a lot of people would be.
Even if you ignore all the other excellent reasons for Nvidia to give handhelds some love, it would at least help improve the perception that Team Green is turning its back on gamers in favor of its focus on AI, a notion that Huang’s comments do little to dismiss.
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