RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Hello from Gamescom 2026 , where yours truly has been trying out some of the latest laptops at the Nvidia booth. The machines I was shown are made by various manufacturers, but all of them have the same core internal hardware, in the form of Nvidia's RTX Spark SOC.
Which means that, alongside 20 Grace CPU cores in the custom Arm-based chip, they've also got 6144 RTX Blackwell GPU cores to play with. And that means RTX 5070 -like gaming performance, at least on paper.
And in practice, each was demonstrated to be capable of running modern games at high frame rates. Exactly how high was kept under wraps, unfortunately, although it was mentioned that frame generation was in use for each.
So, I wasn't able to do any benchmarking of my own, or dig into the settings menus to find out exactly what sort of DLSS/FG combination I was dealing with. Still, 007 First Light , Arc Raiders , Borderlands 4 , and F1 25 were all running without a hitch, which is apparently indicative of the smooth sailing Nvidia has experienced with Microsoft's Prism translation layer .
I asked about any unforeseen emulation issues, but nope, apparently all is well in the land of Windows-on-Arm and Nvidia chips. As for the laptops themselves, I took a few notes based on my brief time playing with them at the booth.
Future
Future
First off, lets talk about the one I really want to take home. The Asus ProArt P14 looks and feels, for all intents and purposes, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 —and that's a very good thing indeed. It's got a milled aluminium chassis that feels robust (yet slim in the hand), a crisp keyboard, and a beautifully vivid OLED panel.
I had a brief run around in Arc Raiders on this particular lappy, and immediately wanted to squirrel it back to my hotel room for a proper gaming session.
14-inch laptops are the perfect size for taking on the road, and the relative lack of weight compared to the beefier (and much older) Blade 15 Advanced in my backpack made me yearn for the little P14 instead.
Proper gaming performance, too? It appears so, although Arc Raiders is far from the most demanding of test games. Still, while I'm not so confident in my abilities as to guess exactly what frame rate or settings combo this machine was running at, I will say it felt like 100 fps+. Ah, go on then. Probably High to Ultra settings. If I was pushed. Maybe.
Special mention should also be given to the Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition . Yes, I associate Dell laptops with being dull as well, but this new XPS model feels excellent, and it's rather handsome, too. The keyboard is as tight as a drum, the OLED display looks great, and it wasn't making a whole lot of noise while I ripped and teared my way through Doom: The Dark Ages .
(Image credit: Future)
It feels like a civilised machine I'd be happy to sling in my bag, at least on this first impression. Both of these laptops look like the sort of thing you might expect to see in a business meeting, but the gaming ability of the RTX Spark SOC squeezed into their slim and light chassis designs is plain to see.
Every laptop showdown, even one as brief as this, is likely to come up with an also-ran that doesn't quite cut the mustard—and for me, this comes in the form of the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra . In a room full of sublime competition, the chassis looks and feels... tired, while the Mini LED screen wasn't particularly enticing to behold. It was trundling away in the corner of the room running World of Tanks , and didn't garner "oohs" and "ahhs" in the same way as the rest.
(Image credit: Future)
Despite the hardware inside, something about it says "old fashioned" to me. It's funny how we judge these things in an instant, but there we are. I'm prepared to change my mind if we get one in for review (I'm incredibly tired and cranky after a long day at the show, after all), but I get the feeling it's going to cost lots of money—without looking and feeling as good as its premium competition.
Ah, now I've gone and done it. I've mentioned the price. Or rather, prices. The Nvidia reps around me refused to be drawn in on exact figures for these Spark-infused machines, especially as some of the models on display had a loadout of 128 GB of RAM. Ludicrous amounts, I think you'll agree, which will almost certainly be sold for ludicrous amounts of cash. For all that local AI stuff you'll be doing, naturally.
Personally, the lesser-seen optimist living in the middle of my cold, brutal heart is still hoping for 16 GB or 32 GB variants of the Asus and Dell laptops for somewhat-reasonable figures—as more slim and light, gaming-capable machines to choose from is always a good thing.
Looking at the state of gaming laptop prices at the moment, though, I think said optimist will probably be let down once more. It was a nice day out, at least. Anyone fancy buying me a bratwurst?
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