How Windows is being optimized for Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops
Microsoft tuned Windows on Arm for Nvidia RTX Spark laptops, including local AI agents and Prism emulation.
Microsoft and Nvidia described Windows work for the first RTX Spark laptops, which use Arm CPUs, Blackwell GPUs, and unified memory rather than x64 chips from AMD or Intel. A new Get Started flow installs agents from the Windows Store; Hermes, Perplexity, and OpenClaw are the first supported agents, with Meta's Muse expected later. Microsoft tuned its Prism x64 emulator for the chips, optimized unified memory including configurations up to 128GB, and added a GPU-memory slider. Several anti-cheat-protected games will run at launch, while Activision's Ricochet support for Call of Duty is targeted for 2027.
- RTX Spark laptops pair an Arm CPU, Blackwell GPU, and unified memory.
- Windows can install Hermes, Perplexity, and OpenClaw agents from the Store in two clicks.
- Prism emulation is tuned for Nvidia's microarchitecture, with monthly compatibility updates.
- Unified memory is managed for large local models while keeping the system responsive.
- Anti-cheat support covers several major games; Call of Duty support is planned for 2027.
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Microsoft and Nvidia held a launch party for the first wave of RTX Spark laptops last week in San Francisco, where a new wave of AI PCs took center stage amid a packed crowd and a lively hands-on area. A day after the media event, I was invited to a quieter Nvidia event to hear a lot more about the new RTX Spark computing platform. While Nvidia’s new laptops might look like regular Windows machines, the chips inside are Arm-based, instead of the traditional x64 architecture used by AMD and Intel. Combined with a powerful GPU, RTX Spark is designed for the future of AI, and it means a lot of work has gone into getting these laptops ready for launch.
One of the biggest challenges was getting Windows ready for AI agents and local AI models. The big selling point of RTX Spark is the combination of Arm CPU, Blackwell GPU, and unified memory to enable powerful AI models to run on a laptop, so the experience of setting up an AI agent needs to be quick and easy.
“When users get into Windows for the first time, they’ll see a new Get Started experience that will launch on an RTX Spark laptop that allows them to find the agent they want, get started with that agent, install it, and get to that agent in only two clicks,” says Peter Dawoud, principal program manager at Microsoft.
Agents can be installed and updated through the Windows Store, so you don’t have to worry about finding updates or figuring out what dependencies each one needs. “We’ll continue to develop it and add more features so that agents can offer a whole new bunch of experiences coming through Windows,” Dawoud says.
Hermes, Perplexity, and OpenClaw are the first three officially supported agents in Windows at the launch of RTX Spark, but Microsoft is working on bringing others on board. That will presumably eventually include Muse, which Meta announced last week is coming to Windows at some point in the future.
Getting started with Hermes was mostly a two-click experience in my testing, but I did run into trouble getting OpenClaw set up properly. The app kept complaining that a local gateway hadn’t been installed properly, and it took an uninstall and reinstall to get everything working fully.
I’ve been using OpenClaw for a variety of tasks over the past week, but it’s going to take a lot more testing to really understand the value of this local AI support beyond obvious tasks like coding. Powerful as the RTX Spark chip is, large local models are still a lot slower at responding to prompts than cloud models, so I get the feeling that I’ll use this more for tasks I want to run overnight or leave processing in the background.
Microsoft has also done a lot of work behind the scenes to optimize Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips for all the things you’d expect to do on a Windows laptop. Unlike an Intel or AMD laptop, RTX Spark laptops make use of Microsoft’s Prism emulator for apps that don’t have a native Arm version.
Emulation was a problem on Windows on Arm for more than a decade, but the launch of Qualcomm’s first Snapdragon X series laptops a couple of years ago has helped RTX Spark laptops now benefit from a variety of Arm-native apps and Microsoft’s improved emulator.
There’s still a lot of tweaking required for Nvidia’s new chips, though. “Emulation isn’t generic. Each platform needs tuning,” says Dawoud. ”Each core is different. How we translate x64 to that core needs to be highly optimized, and for RTX Spark we’ve done a lot of work to optimize for its microarchitecture.”
Some of that optimization has been focused on gaming, particularly because CPUs often dictate frame pacing of games and how smooth they feel, while a GPU does the heavy lifting of rendering the game. Microsoft is quietly shipping Prism updates all the time. “Every month we ship an update to improve compatibility,” says Dawoud. “It’s something we’re constantly working on at the Windows team.”
Microsoft has been focused on memory optimization for RTX Spark laptops, too. Microsoft’s own Surface Laptop Ultra can ship with up to 128GB of unified memory, making it possible to load huge models into memory. “We made incredible investments in Unified Memory Architecture to enable you to load as much as possible into the 128GB,” says Dawoud. “But we are also conserving a little bit of space to make sure the system maintains its responsiveness, and the applications running on top of Windows continue to run well and continue to be responsive.”
Microsoft has completed optimizations for how memory works on RTX Spark, including tuning for power and performance, maximizing battery life, and ensuring that you can run a game while rendering a video in the background. You can even manually adjust how much of the unified memory is dedicated to the GPU side with a slider in Nvidia’s Windows app.
This slider is useful if you have an RTX Spark laptop with 24GB or 32GB of memory, so you can balance more to the GPU for particular apps and games. While Microsoft and Nvidia maintain that RTX Spark laptops shouldn’t be considered gaming machines, they’re more than capable of running the latest AAA titles.
“Nvidia and Microsoft have expended a lot of energy over the last many, many, many, many months trying to think deeply about making sure that RTX Spark can deliver a true form of RTX gaming experience,” says Dawoud.
One of the first parts of making sure RTX Spark supports gaming was getting anti-cheat vendors on board with Windows on Arm. Some of that work started with Qualcomm, but it has clearly accelerated with Nvidia’s involvement.
Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, Arc Raiders, Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and many other games that have anti-cheat engines will be supported out of the box on RTX Spark laptops. Nvidia and Microsoft are also working with a variety of other anti-cheat providers to make more games available in the future.
Activision’s Ricochet anti-cheat engine, used in Call of Duty, will support RTX Spark at some point in 2027, and EA has committed to getting its Javelin anti-cheat working in Battlefield in early 2027. PUBG will start working on RTX Spark laptops in the first half of 2027, and Riot Games has committed to getting League of Legends and Valorant running on RTX Spark laptops at some point in the future.
Microsoft is also bringing its advanced shader delivery system to RTX Spark. This allows the Xbox app to preload game shaders during download. It’s the same experience that’s been available on Xbox Ally devices, allowing you to download a game, click launch, and have shaders automatically precompiled so you don’t have to sit there and wait to play.
I haven’t run into many game compatibility issues during my testing, even though nearly every game I’ve tested has run emulated. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips just weren’t powerful enough on the GPU side to make gaming a reality, but Nvidia has put a much more powerful GPU inside the RTX Spark.
Your mileage in gaming is going to vary depending on the title, but for the most part I’ve found that medium settings, running at 1440p and DLSS performance, will get you to a stable 60fps in most games. In some titles you may need to drop the resolution or settings lower, though. This definitely isn’t as good as a dedicated gaming laptop, but for something that’s roughly on the level of a MacBook Pro it’s more than good enough for gaming on the go.
The last part of Microsoft’s work on RTX Spark involves Windows features. Surprisingly, Copilot Plus PC features like Recall aren’t available on RTX Spark devices at launch. It’s not clear why they’re delayed, but it sounds like they won’t be available fully until next year. “We are partnering closely with Nvidia to deliver Copilot Plus PC experiences on RTX Spark, expected to first become available to Windows Insiders later this year,” says Adrienne Brewbaker, senior director of Windows marketing.
Microsoft is also working on a new Windows Search interface that will work best on devices like the RTX Spark. The interface is being overhauled to focus on speed, and even includes actions that let you do things like turn Bluetooth on or off right from the search bar. It essentially turns Windows Search into a launcher, a much-needed improvement. “We think you’ll love it,” says Dawoud. “We think it’ll change the way people interact with Windows.”
The pad
- Xbox is officially embracing the chaos of AI-powered game ports. Retro gaming is booming at the moment thanks to decompilations and recompilations that are letting gamers port classic titles to new devices, or merge code from two different games into a single new experience. Microsoft is leaning into this effort with a new Xbox Labs group that’s a “small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience,” according to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. Sharma thinks the experiments we’ve seen in recent weeks, where Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside browsers, “challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games.” Part of this also seems to be about using AI inside Xbox, as Sharma notes games share many of the same properties as the workloads AI agents have been tackling on the coding side of things.
- Microsoft has a new machine learning tool to improve weather forecasts. Microsoft claims to have solved old-school physics-based weather forecasting with machine learning. Researchers at the company say they’ve found a new, cost-effective way to make weather forecasts more accurate two to six weeks in advance. Microsoft has even open-sourced the tool it’s using, and published the findings in the journal Nature.
- Honey, Xbox shrunk its controller. Microsoft surprised everyone this week with some new Xbox hardware. The Xbox Nano controller is the company’s smallest controller yet, designed for younger players, smaller hands, and gaming on the go. At $49.99, it’s also more affordable than the regular Xbox controller. It’s around five inches in length and includes Xbox wireless and Bluetooth support for connecting to Xbox consoles and phones, tablets, and PCs. The Xbox Nano controller also includes a rechargeable battery, and doesn’t require AA batteries or a separate charging pack like most Xbox controllers. You can preorder the Xbox Nano now, and it will start shipping in November.
- Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs. Microsoft announced its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip this week, and it’s not all about beating Amazon or Google anymore. This time around the Maia 300 improves the cost and efficiency of running AI workloads in the cloud, and it’s also more capable of handling the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks. These advances will soon make Maia the “primary AI interference system” for Microsoft’s products and services, making the company less reliant on GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.
- Satya Nadella says we should assume all AI models are “compromised.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a lengthy post on X over the weekend that laid out his views on the dangers of advanced AI models. Nadella says we can no longer accept a world where AI is treated as a “set of nested black boxes” whose advice and actions we simply accept or reject. He calls for building a more transparent system where models can be contained, observed, and leave behind “tamper-proof human readable evidence.” Nadella’s recommendations are thoughtful and well-balanced, but unfortunately they were overshadowed by his use of “Super Intelligence” instead of AI. That’s what President Donald Trump wants companies to call AI, and it seems Microsoft is towing the line.
- Microsoft launches its new AI model for making decisions quickly. Microsoft has announced its new Microsoft-Decision-1 model just days after OpenAI revealed its new Decisions API. The model is designed to choose the most efficient AI model to complete a task, and Microsoft claims it beats others in tests to determine speed and accuracy.
- Microsoft 365 Family subscribers will finally be able to share AI benefits. Microsoft is about to let Microsoft 365 Family and Premium subscribers share Copilot and AI usage features, alongside access to Office apps and OneDrive storage, with up to five other people on a plan. The bad part? Instead of getting 1TB of OneDrive storage per account, Microsoft is now limiting this to just 2TB of shared storage across the entire plan. Microsoft argues this makes storage more flexible if one member exceeds 1TB, but it looks like it’s an easy way for the company to upsell more OneDrive storage in reality.
- Forza Horizon 6 is being delayed on PS5 to January 2027. I reported last month that Forza Horizon 6’s PS5 release would be delayed to early 2027, and now Playground Games has officially confirmed the game will debut on January 26th. The delay means the PS5 version will now coincide with a new expansion for the game. Playground Games will also sell a Premium Edition of Forza Horizon 6 on PS5 that offers up to five days of early access ahead of January 26th.
- Microsoft and Japan took down a cybercrime network behind over a billion scam messages. Hopefully you’ll start seeing fewer scam texts about parking fines or fake deliveries, as Microsoft says it has helped dismantle a marketplace for scammers. Together with Japan’s National Police Agency, Microsoft tracked scam activity back to a marketplace called YAM Store and some phishing kits that helped scammers send messages. Microsoft says it disabled over 20,000 accounts connected to YAM Store and blocked over 100,000 web domains being used for impersonation and fraud.
- The Link to Windows app for Android might soon let you shut down your PC remotely. You can already lock your Windows PC through the Link to Windows app, but it looks like you’ll soon be able to shut it down remotely, too. An updated beta version has a new power menu with options to lock, sleep, shut down, or restart a PC.
- How Gears of War: E-Day solves the Xbox Series S memory issue by tapping the SSD. The Coalition has created a solution for working around the 10GB of memory limit on Microsoft’s smaller Xbox Series S console. We’ve heard plenty of stories over the years about how this memory limit has been difficult at times for developers, and now a bespoke system designed in collaboration with the Xbox platform team and Advanced Technology Group has allowed E-Day to use the SSD as a new tier of memory. The technique has allowed The Coalition to keep the game’s density high on the Series S, instead of lowering the quality.
- Microsoft’s science president is leaving after 16 years. There are few people who have had such an impact inside Microsoft as Peter Lee.The president of Microsoft Science is resigning for a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join an elite team,” in what he says is a “major detour” from the work he has been doing over the past 20 years. Lee has always been the main face of Microsoft Research, and he led the company’s research operations across 14 worldwide laboratories over the past four years. I’m not sure where this leaves Microsoft Research, but it definitely leaves Microsoft without another talented executive.
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- Tom Warren