Nvidia unveil their first all-in-one laptop processor, with support for DLSS, ray tracing, frame gen, and all those other RTX features you love and hate

Hark, RTX Spark

After years of whispers around Nvidia maybe, possibly, perhaps getting into CPU-making, they’re making it official with RTX Spark: a fully integrated laptop SoC (System on a Chip), coming to thin 'n' lights in Autumn this year.

Unsurprisingly, given the source of Nvidia’s trillions, RTX Spark has a big focus on agentic AI work, the official descriptions of which are so inducive of malaise that I can’t even bring myself to copy them in from the press release. But there is plenty of note for those who’d use their lightweight laptop to play games, as the SoC’s graphics processor is based on the same Blackwell architecture as Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series of standalone graphics cards. That means it’ll support DLSS 4.5 upscaling, Multi-Frame Generation, ray tracing, Reflex, and G-Sync, all hitherto unseen (or at least extremely rare) on what is essentially integrated graphics. Unless you count the Nintendo Switch 2. And round 'ere, we don’t.

Some of these are more reliably helpful than others, which could be said about a lot of Nvidia’s graphics tech in recent years. For every G-Sync Pulsar there’s been a DLSS 5. But the good stuff – DLSS upscaling, Reflex anti-lag, and G-Sync tear smoothing in particular – have a way of besting the AMD or Intel equivalents with either zero or minimal drawbacks. It’s always been unfortunate, then, that they’ve never been properly supported on laptop SoCs, always requiring a bulkier, likely more power-hungry CPU + discrete GPU setup instead.

RTX Spark will change that, and who knows, may even open up the possibility of handheld PCs with the same box of tools. Spark-based, Steam Machine-style mini PCs are also confirmed as in the works, too – potentially setting up a showdown with Valve’s own choice of all-in-one processor tech.

Mind you, Nvidia’s announcement leaves plenty of unanswered questions. The chip does sound more performance-minded than budget-conscious, also including a 20-core CPU and potentially up to 128GB of unified RAM, but the only indication of actual game speeds so far are brief mentions of Spark being able to run "play AAA games at 1440p resolution and over 100 frames per second with ray tracing, DLSS and Reflex." That’s a big old claim by current integrated GPU standards, especially if it genuinely doesn’t also include frame gen, though we’ll have to wait for proper benchmarks.

Between the lofty performance promises and ongoing PC component shortages – which Nvidia’s own promotion of AI tools has, in part, exacerbated – RTX Spark also raises the issue of pricing. This is almost definitely not going to be a cheap part, which will in turn make the laptops it powers more expensive, which could undermine one of the economic benefits of choosing integrated hardware – over a brawnier but costlier set of dedicated components – in the first place.

Still, this’ll be worth a test, I reckon. Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, and MSI are all on board as RTX Spark laptop makers, with their first models on the shelves this Autumn.