- Nvidia’s RTX Spark won’t be in a PC handheld
- The new SoC is laptop-focused, according to Nvidia’s CEO
- It continues to feel like Team Green isn’t focused on gamers anymore
Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip — its first full system on a chip — landed at Computex with a bang, as the small but mighty ARM SoC looks set to give Apple’s M5 chip a run for its money. But anyone hoping its power might come to a gaming handheld could 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 responded, “If somebody wants to do it, you know, we’ll work with them on it. But right now we’re really focused on doing something that is just such a big deal, reinventing the PC after 40 years.”
On the one hand, this dismissive response makes some sense. While ARM is great in a lot of ways for gaming, it struggles as most titles are built to run on Intel and AMD hardware. You can still game 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 some impressive performance — with 20 cores, a GPU that matches the desktop RTX5070, and a battery life that’s “much better than anything you’ve seen before on RTX laptops” according to Huang, with an Nvidia exec 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 feel this chip could have been the light in PC handheld’s very dark tunnel.
Please don’t ruin the tech I love
In recent months, we’ve seen some seriously major price hikes. Pricier models of the Lenovo Legion Go 2 handheld now cost more than two Nvidia RTX 5080 GPUs, and Valve very recently hiked the Steam Deck OLED price by almost 50%. Nintendo has already teased that the Switch 2 is getting a solid price bump later this year.
The RTX Spark might not help keep costs down dramatically — in fact rumors are laptops will cost close to $3,000, while the smaller Spark would come in at a bit under $2,000 — but if it boasts an impressive performance, and comes with a much needed battery life boost (my Asus Rog Xbox Ally X can only play a couple of hours of 007: First Light at a time) the cost would hit less hard. Beats getting a price hike with no hardware upgrades, 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 glued to my pair — the Switch 2 and Rog Xbox Ally X — throughout 2026, the form factor and portability are a major draw, especially when trying to game while travelling or kicking back in bed.
Admittedly, I’m not in the market for a super-pricey handheld, but I know plenty of folks out there would be.
Even if you ignore all of the other excellent reasons for Nvidia to give handhelds some love, it would at the very least help improve the perception that Team Green is turning its back on gamers in favor of its AI focus — a notion that Huang’s comments don’t do much to dismiss.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
