The use of Remedy’s Northlight engine and NVIDIA’s Path Tracing technology makes Alan Wake 2 one of the most demanding titles ever released. Put any GPU in front of it, and without some of the heavy lifting taken over by upscaling and Frame Generation, the framerate will tank, but there’s a surprise, probably no one saw coming.
The RTX Spark, which is the latest entrant to target the Windows on ARM platform, has been teased to be running the title with DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction enabled. If that doesn’t get you thinking about what this chipset is capable of achieving, then we don’t know what will. Of course, this teaser brings more questions than answers to the table, but we’ll try to tackle any potential queries.
NVIDIA has deliberately prevented any performance metrics from being displayed when showcasing the RTX Spark’s gaming capabilities
The lack of gaming benchmark comparisons surrounding the RTX Spark has filled us with a cloud of doubt, and despite the fact that the silicon houses a Blackwell GPU with the same number of CUDA cores as a desktop RTX 5070, we remain skeptical until we see some metrics for ourselves.
NVIDIA’s head honcho, Jensen Huang, tried to work his magic on the crowd by showing that the RTX Spark could run both 007 First Light and Forza Horizon 6 on battery power, but he too, was mum on the framerates. Now, Jacob Freeman has shared a picture of a laptop powered by the RTX Spark, running Alan Wake 2 with DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction enabled.
The combination of cranking those textures, enabling Path Tracing and Multi-Frame Generation will eat up VRAM like there’s no tomorrow, but that won’t be a problem for the RTX Spark as it can be kitted out with up to 128GB of LPDDR5X unified memory. What’s going to be a problem is how incredibly taxing Path Tracing truly is on a GPU, even with upscaling involved.
It doesn’t matter if you have heaps of VRAM at your disposal, the graphics processor will run out of horsepower long before its framebuffer catches up. Also, forget about running Alan Wake 2 natively because even a desktop RTX 5090 has trouble keeping up. NVIDIA markets RTX Spark-powered laptops as capable of playing titles at 1440p and 100FPS, but from the image above, it’s not clear which graphics settings or resolution were used.
We understand that NVIDIA is trying to play it safe because it doesn’t want its ARM-based silicon to be “Dead On Arrival” if it cannot maintain healthy framerates. Instead, this is a decent tactic to try to hype up the RTX Spark as much as possible. Unfortunately, laptops featuring the NVIDIA SoC aren’t expected until this fall, so unless someone gets a working commercial unit for testing, we’ll have to make do with these teasers.
News Source: Jacob Freeman
About the author: Omar Sohail is a reporter and analyst for Wccftech's mobile section, specializing in the technology and business of the mobile industry. His expertise lies in the intricate hardware supply chain, covering developments in semiconductor manufacturing, chip lithography, and camera sensor technology.
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