Nvidia's RTX Spark Superchip in the Surface Laptop Ultra outperforms Apple's M5 Max MacBook Pro by ~25% in agentic AI completion benchmarks using Qwen models (Jeffrey Kampman/Tom's Hardware)

Welcome to the benchmark thunderdome. Nvidia RTX Spark is here, and I'm allowed to share my week-long testing and live benchmarking results with you. This chip is an Arm-based Grace CPU glued to a Blackwell RTX GPU, sharing up to 128GB of unified memory. But let's get straight to the numbers.

First, let's talk CPU performance. In Geekbench 7, the RTX Spark's single-core and multi-core scores are noticeably slower than Apple's M5 Pro and Max chips. It comes closer to Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, but still has single-core prowess. Current scores are 2,604 (single-core) and 23,610 (multi-core) for the RTX Spark, compared to 3,690 (single-core) and 29,659 (multi-core) for the Apple M5 Pro.

AMD's Ryzen AI Max 395+ and Intel Core Ultra X9 388H follow at 2,903 (single-core) and 17,223 (multi-core), and 2,574 (single-core) and 17,223 (multi-core), respectively.

Now, let's dive into 3DMark gaming benchmarks. Nvidia's RTX Spark matches up to an RTX 5070 gaming laptop in terms of raw performance. It scores 7,492 in Fire Strike Ultra (x64) and 6,050 in Time Spy Extreme (x64). However, Apple's M5 Pro is n/a for these tests on the 3DMark suite for MacBooks. Battery life is a mixed bag, with Nvidia promising all-day battery life, but it still doesn't come close to Apple's MacBook Pro in efficiency.

Web browsing tests show 10 hours and 15 minutes for the RTX Spark, compared to 21 hours and 25 minutes for the M5 Pro. Gaming and local AI performance tests are in line with expectations from an RTX gaming laptop.