Nvidia RTX Spark • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#391

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 7:16 AM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #271

pjmlp wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simple, Android NDK has all the same APIs for 3D rendering and audio, as do all major middleware engines. The failure of business, only reinforces Windows as the platform most studios reach for. Buy Windows, buy Visual Studio, pay game engines licenses, let Valve do the work. This ignoring that current Valve's management doesn't live forever, so who knows what happens afterwards.

A potential change in Valve's culture/management aside, "let valve do the work" is a feature, not a bug. Studio spends all their budget targeting one platform (which still has ~90+% of the PC gaming market), and get Linux support for free. Windows' monopoly on game dev isn't just market share either, since game dev isn't just code. You still need Photoshop, Maya, etc. and in smaller studies there's typically a crosso…

Hardly a monopoly, and the tooling has gotten there, on macOS, on PlayStation, on Switch, even on Android, it is better than GNU/Linux.

Valve isn't going to be around forever porting Windows games into Proton, which is actually hardly any different if they would start selling Nintendo games with Dolphin, if we ignore the legal implications for a moment.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#392

Post by big-chungus4 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

Running local agents 24/7, I get that it's a powerful CPU or GPU or whatever it is, but still, isn't it going to be constantly loud and 95C hot, that can't be good for the laptop if it's like that 24/7

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#393

Post by yurishimo » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 7:32 AM UTC

internet2000 wrote: post #329

kllrnohj wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Apple it worked because they waited until they had a really, really good ARM ISA CPU (combined with arguably sandbagging their x86 offering for a few years prior but I digress). Qualcomm is also working on a really good ARM ISA CPU with their acquisition of NuVia and subsequent Oryon architecture. Meanwhile this is just using off-the-shelf ARM CPUs in a MediaTek SoC with blackwell bolted to the side of it. ARM's…

"Sandbagging their x86 offering" is a new one. There's no winning.

The Intel chips of that time were fine but it was a problem from both sides. Apple refused to "compromise" their hardware design and Intel failed to deliver on their promises regarding power/heat budgets and kept telling Apple execs that they were just one cycle away from fixing all of the problems.

Ultimately, Apple won that fight when they decided to stop letting Intel control their hardware roadmap and it's been a great change for the entire industry. Intel is finally seeing some changes in their own products, largely in response to Apple dropping them. Now Nvidia is getting into the game which means more competition which is also good.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#394

Post by BatteryMountain » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 7:48 AM UTC

gargan wrote: post #386

BatteryMountain wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor…

Linux is terrible on ARM, I don't agree that it runs perfectly fine at all. Try loading Ubuntu onto a Snapdragon laptop for example. It works but lots of issues eg sound, webcam quality, etc

Those are specific firmwares for those devices that are either closed-source binary blobs, open-source hackjobs/reverse engineered attempts, or just plain missing firmwares. The fault is not on Linux but rather on Qualcomm not releasing things for that specific SoC. Some SoC's have better support than others. ARM cpu's themselves works perfectly fine on linux.

Intel has closed things down: some wifi and webcam firmwares are poop and a massive pain to get working on newer chips (if at all). Their wifi firmwares also don't respect certain kernel overrides (which is why I replaced my Intel Wifi 7 chip with a mediatek Wifi 6 one). Blame is 100% on intel and not linux. Broadcom is also pretty bad at being a team player in this regard.

I basically recommend everyone to stick with AMD chipset & GPU's where possible, because they have mainline kernel support nailed down 95% of the time.

Again, ARM works fine, their extra firmwares for extra devices on SoC's are to blame if you struggle.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#395

Post by BatteryMountain » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 7:49 AM UTC

gargan wrote: post #386

BatteryMountain wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor…

Linux is terrible on ARM, I don't agree that it runs perfectly fine at all. Try loading Ubuntu onto a Snapdragon laptop for example. It works but lots of issues eg sound, webcam quality, etc

Webcam firmware & colour grading & programming is a black art btw.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#396

Post by fragmede » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

gargan wrote: post #386

BatteryMountain wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor…

Linux is terrible on ARM, I don't agree that it runs perfectly fine at all. Try loading Ubuntu onto a Snapdragon laptop for example. It works but lots of issues eg sound, webcam quality, etc

GNU/Linux has trouble, but thanks to Android (and ChromeOS), we know Linux itself specifically on ARM does actually work. Freeing those drivers is another matter, unfortunately.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#397

Post by smcleod » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 9:28 AM UTC

Pretty low bandwidth and given how terrible nvidias software has been with the DXG et el, I would not put much faith into this.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#398

Post by ranger_danger » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

gargan wrote: post #386

BatteryMountain wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor…

Linux is terrible on ARM, I don't agree that it runs perfectly fine at all. Try loading Ubuntu onto a Snapdragon laptop for example. It works but lots of issues eg sound, webcam quality, etc

I think you're referring to a specific SoC that's used on recent laptops which happens to have driver issues, something not specific to ARM at all. Other (usually embedded) ARM devices have been running just fine on Linux for over 20 years now.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#399

Post by rickdeckard » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #230

rickdeckard wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's surely one thing, Apple went all-in on ARM, for Microsoft it's still a kinda "reduced experience". But the bigger problem in my opinion: How much of the Windows userbase actually sticks to Windows because of its backwards-compatibility? --> What would happen if they break this model and the OS is only judged based on its user experience and available applications...? I'm not sure it would stand any chance to c…

> MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc. True, but if you're only in the ecosystem as a mac user, in many ways it's felt like a mixed bag. I still wildly prefer mac over other operating systems, but if upgrades had a price, I think those sales would mostly go to iPhone users. Even at free, I'm yet to find a compelling reason to instal…

Agree, it's a fairly closed ecosystem, that's why I personally don't use it.

But despite that, as a Windows user I acknowledge that any kind of interaction with another Mac from within MacOS (Handoff, Sidecar, Universal Control, Bluetooth-pairing to Apple-ID instead of Hardware MAC-ID,...) is leaps ahead of what Microsoft was doing with their OS for the past years.

Just the scenario of an employee getting a Windows laptop as a work-PC, there's barely any halo-effect if he/she also uses Windows at home. No easier handoff, no interaction, hardly any "just-works" connectivity.

Windows is mostly a vessel for the (legacy) applications it can run, and for these Browser-based Microsoft Online-Applications (which work equally-well on other platforms)

They didn't invest in creating "just works" frameworks for their PCs which amplify the ecosystem the more compatible devices you have, instead most of their focus is now on "just-works" stuff in the cloud.

So if Microsoft would make a clean cut on backwards-compatibility, I'm not sure there would be a reason left for most B2C users to even stay with Windows.

The "you can make it work if you invest a bit of time or google it" paradigm is nowadays well-covered by Linux already, and it's getting even harder for brands to compete on price/quality with Apple's scale, for almost any portable device...

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#400

Post by ThunderSizzle » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

kramadeshak wrote: post #385

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #341

I added an R9700 32GB to my 10+ year old desktop that had a 980 4GB card in it, for a grand total of $1350 or so. The payoff compared to what I was using with GHCP was 33 months, but when GHCP announced their price increase, it basically became a 3 month payoff at minimum (so yes, GHCP did a 10x price increase for non-parallel agentic workflows) I can easily run Qwen3.6 35B-A3B with Q5_K_M with a 260k+ context window…

Can you give some context of how you are getting both of those to work? I am guessing vulkan. Did you face any pain during integration? I am planning to add R9700 to my 5070ti and my only concern is if vulkan wouldn't be able to do the heavy lifiting.

My 980 is currently unpowered. I have not tried to integrate them yet. It's on my to-do list, but the first time they were both powered on, the system had booting issues, and I didn't want to care at the time, since the 980 was probably going to be idle 99% of the time anyway.

I'll probably try to figure that problem out in about a month. Worst case is I move it to another even older desktop to replace the 9800 GTX+ inside of that one.