Gaming might only be the third pillar of the ‘who is RTX Spark for?’ foundations, but that doesn’t mean it’s been an afterthought. Especially not when Nvidia’s developer relations team is going out and helping the likes of Remedy make a completely native version of Alan Wake 2—one of the most graphically intensive DX12 games out there—and making it run great on Nvidia’s RTX Spark.
I’ve been playing this native Arm build of Alan Wake 2 on a pre-release version of Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and, while I’m under careful watch so I don’t go digging around in the settings, the experience is smooth and the game looks great. And crucially I’m not seeing the telltale smearing of text, input lag, and fine detail screwiness that would tell me it’s using a ton of multi frame gen just to get the game running at the 2560 x 1600 resolution I’m playing at. Though I’m confident it is running some level of frame gen in there to get this game running so smoothly on this machine.
Microsoft has been working on this laptop with Nvidia for about three years, Nvidia has been working with MediaTek for two and a half years to make the silicon. And that would suggest Remedy’s had ample time to get working on the native Arm port for Nvidia hardware, but Nvidia currently won’t be drawn on exactly how long it has taken to get this fully native version up and running.
But it looks damned good to my eyes, and plays well either on keyboard and mouse or with a controller plugged in. Obviously though, this is a tightly controlled demo, and I can’t dig in to see what the specific settings are inside the game, but this is still a DirectX 12 game, with a native Arm port running smoothly on this thin-and-light gaming laptop without blowing a gale out the back.
During my time prodding and poking every single RTX Spark laptop and desktop that has made it up to Nvidia’s demo floor—from Microsoft, to Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and MSI—I’ve also had a chance to play with emulated versions of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Pragmata. Not new beta versions, but simply downloaded from Steam and running on these 64 GB versions of the RTX Spark chip.
“What we’re showcasing here is, if you’re a developer and your game is running through an emulator, we’re going to work with you to make sure it’s a good experience,” says Jo Vivoli, senior manager in Nvidia’s tech marketing team. “If you want to make a native arm build, we’re going to work with you to make sure it’s a good experience.”
And it’s something a Microsoft engineer, who has been working on RTX Spark for the past three years echos as I step up to play Indiana Jones.
“It’s running through emulation,” he says, “and so we wanted to highlight the deep investment that Nvidia and Microsoft has made to make sure that gaming is truly an activity that you can participate on an RTX Spark, and it delivers the expected performance and visuals that you would get out of an RTX graphics card.”
And it’s all working. I also inexpertly bashed through Pragmata, though this is actually the first time playing the game so I had zero idea what the hell I was doing, why there was a little bot-girl on my back, and why this other robot-with-a-sword wanted to chop us into itty bitty bits. But the game ran super smoothly, even if my gaming skills did not.
Now, this is surely not going to be the universal experience for every game, no matter how commited to the experience either Microsoft or Nvidia are—there is simply too large a back catalogue of games in the PC’s long library and there will surely be titles that do not play ball.
But it has been focused on at least what it sees as the biggest games. “We’ve been looking at the 200 largest, most used creative applications, most used games,” another Microsoft representative tells me. “And we’re on track to have those working in time for launch.”
Maybe suspiciously, this is an Nvidia demo suite and there’s no hint of Cyberpunk 2077. Will that work for launch? I’m told they think it does, but I guess we’ll find out in the autumn.