Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops make no sense — until they do

We’re not completely at “never think about it” territory yet, though. Mark ran into some software wrinkles during Surface testing, including needing a beta version of Adobe Premiere because the shipping version didn’t properly support RTX Spark’s GPU.

That shouldn’t scare everybody away, but I’d absolutely investigate your specific software stack before spending several thousand dollars on one of these machines, especially if your livelihood depends on specialized utilities, drivers, plug-ins, or some obscure Windows software written when Bill Clinton was president. RTX Spark is a first-generation platform doing some unusual things. Expect some first-generation growing pains.

So who should actually buy RTX Spark?

After weeks of several staffers across PCWorld intensively testing this hardware, trying to find THE TRUTH about RTX Spark, I think the answer is pretty clear. Heavy AI developers and researchers should absolutely pay attention, especially if they regularly run models that overwhelm conventional GPU memory or spend serious money on cloud inference. Creative professionals experimenting heavily with local AI could also find a lot to like here, assuming their crucial software works properly on the platform.

Gamers should look elsewhere unless gaming is secondary to those AI workloads. The gaming performance is much better than I expected, but conventional GeForce laptops deliver more bang for…