The NVIDIA N1X is surely powerful enough for the Windows-on-Arm market, but the current prototype software prevents it from reaching its full potential.
User Puts Microsoft's Unreleased NVIDIA N1X-Equipped Surface Laptop Ultra To Test; Discovers Chip Being Held Back by Unfinished Drivers
The NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops will debut in the coming weeks, and if you were wondering about their performance numbers, here is an early sneak peek by a TechPowerUp user, who got his hands on an early prototype from Microsoft. The user "Fouquin" says he found the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with NVIDIA's RTX Spark N1X on the roadside, and since then, he has been playing around with the device.
After a month-long hands-on with this unreleased laptop, the user shared his experience with the N1X Arm processor, which uses a 20-core Arm processor coupled with a Blackwell GPU, featuring 6144 CUDA Cores. The laptop was configured with 24 GB of unified memory and a 512 GB SSD, and as per the user, he tested the laptop with older Game Ready 591.33 drivers as well as the 616.00 preview driver, featuring CUDA 13.4 alongside updated OpenGL and Vulkan support.
Gaming was one of the biggest disappointments during the testing. The user witnessed the GPU fluctuating between 1.5 GHz and 2.3 GHz, resulting in frame stutters every few seconds. The performance remained virtually unchanged whether the system was running on battery, a 64W power limit, or a 105W limit. This indicates that the prototype was inherently power constrained, due to which games like Helldrivers 2 and certain GPGPU integer tests suffered from crashes.
Even with the newer 616.00 driver, it failed to deliver meaningful improvements in performance or stability. Instead, the idle power consumption increased noticeably, and the GPU stuttering persisted. As far as the performance in synthetic tests is concerned, the laptop delivered 123 points in single-core and 1,386 points in multi-core tests in Cinebench 2024. In Cinebench 2026, the scores were 540 and 5,771 points. The user also shared results for various 3D Mark applications as well as for AI workloads.
Here, despite shipping with CUDA 1.34, the CUDA acceleration failed in the Phoronix AI benchmark suite, with workloads timing out before falling back to Vulkan Compute. The Vulkan tests completed successfully, but produced modest scores.
Overall, although the user was impressed with the laptop's build quality, keyboard, and cooling design, he appeared disappointed with the current software experience. It appears that this prototype was far from retail-ready, but much of its untapped performance likely stems from immature firmware and drivers rather than from the NVIDIA N1X chip itself.
About the author: Sarfraz Khan is a hardware reporter with a focus on PC components and the builder community. With years of experience writing about PC hardware and laptops, his work has been featured on several reputable technology publications. Sarfraz's hands-on experience is demonstrated through his first-person accounts of using and comparing different hardware configurations, providing practical and relatable insights for everyday users. His technical analysis is respected by peers in the enthusiast community and has been cited by specialized hardware sites such as Germany's Igor's Lab.
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