Surface Laptop Ultra hands-on review: the future for Nvidia RTX Spark and all Windows 11 ARM laptops

The Shortcut's Kevin Lee goes hands-on with Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra at Computex 2026, calling it the most exciting Surface product in years and arguably the strongest MacBook Pro competitor any Windows laptop manufacturer has ever produced. Wrapped in a premium all-aluminum chassis that feels like one solid block of milled metal, the laptop measures just 18mm thin and weighs under 4.5 pounds. The 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen delivers a 2880 × 1920 resolution at 120Hz with a searing 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness — enough to make ray-traced games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle look spectacular. Microsoft's largest-ever haptic touchpad not only simulates clicks but provides tactile feedback while hovering over Windows 11 UI elements like close buttons and snap layouts, adding a new dimension to desktop interaction.

Under the hood, NVIDIA's RTX Spark superchip combines a custom 20-core Grace CPU with 6,144 Blackwell CUDA cores delivering RTX 5070-class graphics, plus over 1,000 TOPS of AI performance — enough to run 120-billion-parameter models entirely on-device. Configurations support up to 128GB of unified memory, though Nvidia confirmed options will range down to 16GB. Creative workflows benefit immediately: Adobe Premiere Pro optimized for RTX Spark rendered a test scene twice as fast as the unoptimized version, and accelerated 4:2:2 video support means footage from Canon, Nikon, Sony, and DJI cameras can be edited at full resolution without proxy workflows. Lee was also able to seamlessly fly through a five-kilometer-square Unreal Engine 5 environment running entirely through Nvidia's Prism emulation layer, which Nvidia claims adds only 5–10% CPU overhead.

Gaming performance is equally impressive: Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle ran at well over 60 fps at full resolution with ray tracing enabled, DLSS set to Balanced, and 2x Multi-Frame Generation active — all with minimal latency. Even emulated titles like Pragmata and Fortnite played without issue, suggesting Windows on ARM's gaming gap is closing fast. Cooling is handled by the largest fans Microsoft has ever put in a Surface device, delivering 2.5x the airflow of the Surface Laptop 8th Gen through a new copper cold plate and carefully engineered venting. Pricing remains unknown ahead of the Fall 2026 launch, but Lee's hands-on verdict positions the Surface Laptop Ultra as a genuine inflection point for Windows on ARM laptops.