- Nvidia’s RTX Spark won’t be in a handheld
- New SoC is focused on laptops, says Nvidia CEO
- It still feels like Team Green is no longer focused on the players
Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip – its first complete system-on-a-chip – has landed at Computex with flying colors, as the small but powerful ARM SoC looks set to give Apple’s M5 chip a run for its money. But anyone hoping for its power to come to a gaming handheld might be disappointed, and that includes me.
Speaking after Spark’s announcement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was asked if it could appear in a handheld, to which he replied: “If someone wants to do it, you know, we’ll work with them on that. But right now we’re really focused on something that’s so important, reinventing the PC after 40 years.”
On the one hand, this dismissive response makes sense. While ARM is great in many ways for gaming, it struggles because most titles are designed to run on Intel and AMD hardware. You can still play on chips like Spark with an emulation layer that translates the software to ARM hardware, but this has a serious impact on the title’s performance.
On the other hand, Spark promises impressive performance – with 20 cores, a GPU that matches the desktop RTX5070, and battery life that’s “much better than anything you’ve seen before on RTX laptops” according to Huang, with an Nvidia executive telling us we should “expect all-day battery life.”
With rumors of a smaller (read: more handheld-friendly), but slightly less powerful Spark on the way, I can’t help but think that this chip could have been the light in the very dark handheld PC tunnel.
Please don’t ruin the technology I love
In recent months, we have seen very significant price increases. More expensive models of the Lenovo Legion Go 2 handheld now cost more than two Nvidia RTX 5080 GPUs, and Valve very recently increased the price of the Steam Deck OLED by almost 50%. Nintendo has already announced that the Switch 2 will see a big price increase later this year.
The RTX Spark might not help bring down costs significantly – in fact, the laptops are rumored to cost close to $3,000, while the smaller Spark is said to cost just under $2,000 – but if it delivers impressive performance and comes with a much-needed boost in battery life (my Asus Rog Xbox Ally 007: First Light at a time), the cost would be less heavy. It’s better than a price increase without a hardware upgrade, that’s for sure.
Some might question the appeal of a handheld if it costs as much as a full gaming laptop, but having been stuck with my pair – the Switch 2 and Rog Xbox Ally
Granted, I’m not in the market for a super expensive handheld, but I know a lot of people would be.
Even if you ignore all the other excellent reasons why Nvidia is giving handhelds some love, at the very least it would help improve the perception that Team Green is turning its back on gamers in favor of AI – a notion that Huang’s comments do little to dismiss.
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