RTX Spark Is Apple’s And Qualcomm’s Kryptonite In One Crucial Area And These Two Only Have A Year To Get Things Right

The ARM-based ecosystem has been graced by another entrant in the form of NVIDIA’s RTX Spark, and with its arrival in laptops this fall, Qualcomm and Apple should feel a little hint of worry, mainly in one category, because they have had years to address a problem existing in these notebook SoCs and have failed to do so. Well, the clock is ticking for these two companies.

Gaming continues to be a weakness for both Apple Silicon and Snapdragon, with only a decent experience possible by spending top-tier funds on the M5 Max

Before the arrival of RTX Spark, having heaps of memory was an Achilles Heel for desktop and laptop GPUs when running AI models locally. Now, with up to 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM available, which matches the top-tier configuration of the M5 Max, the RTX Spark cannot just bulldoze through the aforementioned task seamlessly, it’ll also likely have the upper hand in gaming.

With just one launch, NVIDIA can potentially take away Apple’s and Qualcomm’s customer base. The company has stated that the RTX Spark’s Blackwell GPU can achieve 100FPS at the 1440p resolution in current AAA titles, and while we’ll wait to see actual numbers for ourselves, a few demos involving PRAGMATA and Alan Wake 2 have turned us into a partial believer.

Now, we know what you’re going to say; this level of performance isn’t possible without DLSS and Frame Generation. To be fair, you’re probably right, but like it or not, AI computing in games is the only way forward. Irrespective of how much you clamor about “fake frames” or that developers aren’t putting in the optimization work in games, if you’re achieving playable framerates with upscaling and interpolation, we’re all for it.

Also, NVIDIA has two of the best weapons available to enable RTX Spark to spike that gaming experience to the next level; DLSS and Frame Generation. Since the Blackwell architecture can now support up to 6x Multi-Frame Generation, it’s miles ahead of what Apple and Qualcomm have tried to bring to the table. Cyberpunk 2077 is just one example of this performance, with our three-year-old laptop RTX 4090 outperforming the top-tier M5 Max and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme.

Cyberpunk 2077 performance metrics	Laptop RTX 4090	M5 Max (18-core CPU, 40-core GPU)	Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme
Resolution	2,560 x 1,600	1,920 x 1,080	1,920 x 1,080
Preset	Custom (maximum settings)	Custom (maximum settings)	Medium
Textures	High	High	Medium
Upscaling	DLSS Balanced	MetalFX Quality	Off
Frame Generation	Enabled	Enabled (FSR 3.1)	Off
Path Tracing	Enabled	Enabled	No
Average FPS	88.52	79.26	30-40

Bear in mind that a 14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU retails for a jaw-dropping $4,099, and to see it get beaten by a previous-generation graphics chip is downright embarrassing. In comparison, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme looks like a much better value as laptops like ASUS’ Zenbook A16 featuring the SoC are retailing for $1,999 on Amazon, making it less than half the price of an M5 Max MacBook Pro.

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Sadly, when gaming performance is brought into the equation, Qualcomm’s latest and greatest also produces a mixed bag, which begs the question; will RTX Spark laptops take the ARM-based market by storm?

Compute performance is the RTX Spark’s weakest link, but it’ll matter little in the long run

Despite featuring altered Cortex-X925 cores, there’s no two ways about it; NVIDIA is using two-year-old ARM designs, which shouldn’t be the case when you’re competing with chipsets like the M5 Max and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. However, even though the compute performance is less than the M3 Max, you probably won’t notice this difference during everyday use.

For running the more taxing workloads, such as 3D rendering, exporting videos, running local LLMs, image editing, and more, the majority of the heavy lifting will be done by the Blackwell GPU, thanks to supporting the entire NVIDIA stack. Even if some of the workload is carried out by the CPU, its 20-core configuration is more than sufficient to handle anything thrown in its path. In short, the kind of work you’ll be doing on RTX Spark laptops, you’ll probably not notice this difference.

To showcase an example, we’re working on an undervolted Core i9-14900HX CPU running in a gaming laptop, and never once have we been able to overwork it. The only time we witness a slight millisecond delay is when multitasking in Windows 11, but that's just the optimization bits that need to be addressed by Microsoft.

RTX Spark laptops are probably going to be expensive, but their unified memory architecture will handle a problem that could only be tackled by Apple Silicon

While RTX Spark isn’t primarily targeting gamers, the Blackwell GPU ensures it’ll reach a strong audience that wants to play AAA titles fluidly. Thanks to the unified memory architecture, RTX Spark is no longer a victim of VRAM shortages when cranking up visual settings, with perhaps the only limiting factor being GPU processing for running rasterized and ray-traced workloads.

As mentioned above, NVIDIA’s stack of upscaling and Frame Generation places it in a much more superior position than the M5 Max or Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, and in the majority of games, you’ll never miss seeing the inclusion of DLSS or FG. While gaming is just one aspect of the RTX Spark that we believe to be superior over its direct competitors, it’s a pretty big market that Apple and Qualcomm are missing out on, and we fear that a massive customer base could go into NVIDIA’s pocket if these opportunities are passed on every generation.

Why do Apple and Qualcomm only have a year to get things right?

RTX Spark won’t be a “one-off” launch, and as NVIDIA mentioned during the chipset’s official announcement, the company is preparing successors, starting with the Vera Rubin Spark architectures. Pretty soon, that compute performance gap of the Cortex-X925 clusters that everyone is grumpy about will become a memory.

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