Windows Central Insider
NVIDIA has confirmed that its upcoming RTX Spark SoC will be fully compatible with every Windows app ever made, in an attempt to ease concerns around Windows on Arm app compatibility on upcoming devices like the Surface Laptop Ultra.
CEO Jensen Huang was quick to confirm during the NVIDIA Computex 2026 keynote that that RTX Spark is compatible with any app or game you might want to run on these powerful devices, though he did not provide technical details around how this is being ensured.
"Every single application that Windows has ever run, meticulously optimized so that this computer literally runs everything the world has ever created" said Huang on stage.
Windows on Arm has had little app compatibility issues for a number of years, but there are still some apps and games that won't run on existing Windows on Arm PCs.
It sounds like NVIDIA has solved this issue, meaning buyers should not need to be concerned about whether RTX Spark powered devices will run their apps or games, obscure or otherwise. Of course, it remains to be seen if this is actually true.
Today, Windows 11 on Arm devices utilize an emulation layer called Prism which is capable of running x86 compiled apps on Arm-based SoCs. It's capable of running most x86 apps, though some are too complex or too old to run optimally or at all. For most users, it already runs all the apps they'd ever need to run on Windows.
It's likely that RTX Spark will use this same Prism emulation layer, meaning it's possible that Microsoft is working on more updates to Prism to ensure wider compatibility. NVIDIA is confident that these devices will run every Windows app.
Of course, a large percentage of Windows apps are now natively compiled for Windows on Arm anyway, so the emulation layer is less of a concern for most people. Gaming is an outlier, where most games are not Arm native, but NVIDIA says these devices should run your games just fine too thanks to its powerful RTX class GPU.
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