Nvidia RTX Spark benchmarks LIVE: I'm testing CPU, GPU, AI and gaming performance

Now for Gears of War: E-Day

This came out recently, and I saw it being played at the Surface Laptop Ultra event in San Francisco, so of course I had to push it further here.

This is running at 2180x1453 Ultra settings with DLSS 4.5 Dynamic and RTX Mega Geometry turned on.

Some observations here — this is clearly a scalable engine on PC that can run fast here. But there were some micro stutters when I pushed it to the bleeding edge.

That being said, the average frame time and response to controller inputs meant this all felt smooth with virtually zero latency.

Back to creatives

PugetBench is a good way of seeing how a laptop will fare in your standard creative prosumer workload across Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Here's how RTX Spark fared in my testing.

The finely-tuned cores of the M5 Pro take the win here, but RTX Spark does take a leap ahead of its Windows competition in creator performance.

Gaming on battery — better than gaming laptops (but not by much)

If you're expecting that same all-day battery life claim to extend to gaming, that's not the case. You do indeed get more stamina than you're average gaming laptop, but not by much.

Black Myth Wukong testing time!

Is this a safe space? ...I'm really not a fan of Black Myth: Wukong.

OK I get it! I can appreciate the craft of it, and I get why people love it. I've just never got on with it. That being said, I did benchmarks for this too.

...you spotting a pattern? This maxed out RTX Spark is lining up pretty much neck-and-neck with the RTX 5070, while also running cooler and more efficiently. Nifty!

Next up: Cyberpunk 2077

Listen up, choombas! It wouldn't be an Nvidia laptop test if we didn't touch on Cyberpunk 2077. For context on this one, I'm gonna match it up against gaming laptops with different GPUs, so you can see where it lands.

And if you're curious, I got 38.9 FPS when unplugged (basically 39).

Kicking off with Forza Horizon 6

Forza Horizon 6 is one of my favorite racing games of the past decade, so it only makes sense I start here. Let's max it without DLSS tech and see what we get.

Bear in mind this is a stress test of epic proportions, but you can see how it struggles. That 1% low is a good calculator of the consistency of the frame rate, which is highly volatile here.

Interestingly, as I tried this push to Extreme + RT settings, I noticed some rubberbanding in the gameplay — probably down to the CPU having to work overtime translating the x86 code of the game while also sending the instructions to the GPU.

You can see that as Frametime spikes can be seen anywhere from 60ms up to 140ms. The game feels sluggish.

But now let's hone it. Thinking about this like an RTX 5070 laptop, I'll drop it down to Ultra + RT (same resolution) and stick on DLSS 4.5 set to auto with dynamic frame generation.

Immediately this feels so much better to play! There's still some latency spikes here and there, but none that are barely noticeable.

Also interesting to note, the temperatures on the GPU dropped too by one degree (71 C in first run, and 70C in second).

And the cherry on top — here's performance on battery.

Yep, same performance on and off the charger here! More games to come.

Now for 3DMark on battery performance

So we see the CPU behaves the same way, but what about the GPU? Good question! Before I get into the proper gaming antics, let's use 3DMark as our synthetic foot in the door for this.

Once again, same performance on and off the battery. This is consistent with what Nvidia's been telling us, and its one of the features gatekept by Apple MacBooks that is now in the hands of Windows users!

Now if you bare with me for a little bit to set things up here in the lab, it's time for some games...my favorite bit.

Let's test the claim of the same performance on and off the charger

I saw apps running at the same sort of pace during Nvidia demos, but does this translate into numbers?

Now I know there's a difference maker in here — Windows power settings. Putting it to best efficiency will probably starve the chip of power to match it. With that in mind, I've just done the test in both this mode and best performance to see what I get.

Certainly a surprise to see it gain a few points when unplugged, but this falls into that window of variabilities in the test results I've been getting. So the answer is a resounding "yes," provided you slap on best performance.

Let's get to Cinebench

Unfortunately, there isn't any GPU testing available here yet (the Optix driver for the chip isn't there), so this is a straight CPU comparison.

These numbers to put it ahead of Intel, AMD and Qualcomm's latest flagships, but Apple M5 Pro (again) comes out on top.

P.S. to the guy who emailed me — yes that is a signed 1996 Nottingham Forest ball. No, it's not for sale (you reds!)

Let's stress the chip with some Handbrake action

One of the tests we run across all systems is transcoding a copy of Tears of Steel from 4k down to 1080p. This is a solid real-world test of video encoding and real-world multi-core processing.

Here's how it fares against the competition.

As you can see, it clearly leads the way in Windows laptops (Intel caught napping there), but Apple silicon reigns as champ.

Geekbench 7 shows the CPU is a crack in the armor

Let's get to the CPU math. How does Nvidia’s Arm-based Grace CPU stack up against Apple, AMD and Intel?

Here is the brutal truth: if you’re looking for RTX Spark to claim that single- and multi-core crown from the Cupertino crew, you won’t find it.

In Geekbench 7, the RTX Spark’s speeds are noticeably slower than Apple’s M5 Pro and Max chips by quite a margin. Things get closer on the multicore when compared to Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, but single-core prowess still exists.

Who should buy RTX Spark, and who should buy a gaming laptop?

That battery equivalency does raise another question — who is RTX Spark for?

Because for all intents and purposes, an RTX 50-series gaming laptop could do a lot of this workload, whether it’s gaming, creative work or some of the local AI stuff. And depending on how efficient that gaming laptop can run, you could get a similar battery life.

The real differentiator comes in that unified memory. With there being two pools of memory between the RAM and the GPU’s VRAM in a gaming laptop, it’s not as efficient as having one giant tub of it that can be divided depending on job priority.

That means on RTX Spark, you can run vastly larger local AI models, and larger projects in the likes of Blender than you could elsewhere. This is definitely for the prosumer market.

Now let's get into the AI performance

You're probably reading about my adventures into local AI on RTX Spark this week. To put some numbers to Nvidia's advantage here, I ran it through UL Procyon AI benchmarks.

This isn't a test that has been normally run on other laptops in the Tom's Guide lab, so I've had to ask around my friends for insights on this.

In their experience, RTX Spark seems to be surpassing the M5 Pro's AI prowess, exceeding the capabilities of AMD Ryzen AI Max+ and blowing past Intel Core Ultra X9. Once I can do these tests myself, I'll do a follow up.

Also, for what it's worth, here's the comparison to my RTX 5060 Ti 16GB desktop GPU.

A reduction is always expected between the raw wattage of desktop parts and a laptop chip, but the Spark does get impressively close.

Battery life is a mixed bag

So what about stamina? Nvidia promised all-day battery life and technically that’s true. But it doesn’t come close to the efficiency king of Apple’s MacBook Pro.

When it comes to gaming or running local AI at full pelt, this falls in line with what you’d expect from an RTX gaming laptop (our gaming test result got one hour and thirty eight minutes) — give or take about 20-30 minutes depending on how much power the internals soak up.

What about 3DMark gaming benchmarks?

This is where Nvidia gets its lick back against the competition. It has a massive Blackwell RTX GPU in it after all, and when you look at the 3DMark numbers, it matches up to something you’d see in an RTX 5070 gaming laptop — even when tasked with x86 emulation in some of these tests.

The two that are n/a on Apple M5 Pro aren't available on the 3DMark suite for MacBooks.