For the longest time, Windows on Arm has been the purview of Snapdragon processors with Adreno CPUs (and occasionally some repurposed Mac silicon). A couple of months ago, though, Nvidia finally announced RTX Spark, an Arm processor with some real GPU grunt. And it seems that might have sparked (sorry) the onset of being able to use at least some Nvidia GPUs with the forked operating system.
As spotted by Windows Latest, a developer on Chinese forum Bilibili has managed to get an RTX 4060 working on Windows on Arm using a driver based on the “RTX Spark laptop driver”. The dev responsible, VoidTech, suggests this is driver 590. This is an older Nvidia driver, as we’re currently at version 610.74, and it reportedly doesn’t support DGX Spark processors that RTX Spark is based on.
All this is to say, I’m not sure exactly what is going on with the specific driver in question, but VoidTech does explicitly say it’s based on an RTX Spark driver. I have little reason to doubt it, especially given there are now some official drivers for RTX Spark in the wild.
The dev gets some games up and running, including the Black Myth: Wukong benchmark. Focusing on that as our test case for a moment, the video shows an average of 21 fps at 1080p (DLSS on just for AA, not upscaling) on medium settings and ray tracing off (according to some AI-aided translation of the Chinese characters). That’s not even half as good as what we tested the RTX 4060 at on a standard Windows install with similar settings (50 fps on High settings, TSR on just for AA).
So not exactly great, but honestly the fact that it’s working at all is impressive. These are far from official drivers, remember. Plus, it’s running on a Huawei Kunpeng 920 processor which is optimised for servers and unlikely to have the same kind of gaming chops as desktop one.
When it comes to actual RTX Spark gaming performance, Nvidia has promised 100 fps at 1440p in the latest games. Our Dave got to actually try out Spark playing Alan Wake 2 and was pretty impressed with how smooth it runs, though we’ll have to wait until the chip launches this autumn to form a concrete view.
As far as to what extent RTX Spark will open up Windows on Arm for gaming on other devices, well, running an RTX 4060 on Windows on Arm is certainly a good sign, is it not? It’s difficult to imagine a world where Nvidia manages to keep its drivers only working with that chip and not other Nvidia ones, once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak.
And our Dave notes that he spotted early Qualcomm X Elite dev units with references to PCIe graphics connections in the BIOS, implying there’s always been a latent possibility for discrete GPUs on Windows on Arm. It’s all a question of how quickly real support comes along and how well the software allows it to perform.
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