A developer has demonstrated that a standard Nvidia graphics card can function within a Windows on Arm environment. By leveraging drivers based on Nvidia's RTX Spark mobile technology, an RTX 4060 GPU was made to work on the ARM-based operating system. This marks a significant step for Windows on Arm, which has historically been limited to integrated graphics solutions like Qualcomm's Adreno.
The developer, known as VoidTech on the Chinese forum Bilibili, utilized a driver derived from the RTX Spark laptop driver, specifically version 590. This version predates current Nvidia driver releases, and it's noted that it does not support the DGX Spark processors upon which the RTX Spark is based. The exact technical details of the driver's implementation remain somewhat obscure, but its origin in RTX Spark technology is confirmed.
Testing the setup with the Black Myth: Wukong benchmark, the RTX 4060 on Windows on Arm achieved an average of 21 frames per second at 1080p resolution with medium settings and ray tracing disabled. DLSS was enabled for anti-aliasing but not for upscaling. For comparison, the same RTX 4060 on a standard Windows installation with similar settings achieved approximately 50 fps on high settings. While the current performance is considerably lower than expected for the hardware, the fact that the GPU is operational at all is seen as a major achievement, especially given that these are not official drivers and the system is running on a Huawei Kunpeng 920 processor, which is optimized for servers and not typically suited for gaming workloads.
Nvidia has previously stated its ambition for RTX Spark to deliver 100 fps at 1440p in modern games. Initial impressions of RTX Spark itself have been positive, with early tests showing smooth performance in titles like Alan Wake 2. The successful integration of a discrete RTX 4060 into Windows on Arm suggests a broader potential for Nvidia GPUs to be supported on the platform in the future. Reports of early Qualcomm X Elite development units featuring references to PCIe graphics connections in their BIOS also hint at a latent possibility for discrete GPU support on Windows on Arm systems. The ultimate realization of this potential hinges on the speed of official driver development and the optimization of software to leverage such hardware effectively.
