🏆 Review score: 4.5/5
🏅 Editor’s Choice Award
✅ Pros
💻 Gaming laptop-grade GPU in a thin-and-light laptop
🎮 Impressive gaming performance even while playing through an emulator
👾 Full access to all of Nvidia’s latest features, including DLSS 5.0, MFG, and path tracing
💾 Awesome multitasking and creative app performance
❌ Cons
🧠 No dedicated GDDR7 video memory for the GPU
🪭 Loud fans at maximum load
The Shortcut Review
The Asus ProArt P16 is the perfect example of what a beastly laptop you can get with Nvidia RTX Spar. First off, it puts a powerful multi-tasking processor with the GPU of a gaming laptop and the local AI processing power of a small server into a 3.9-pound laptop. It also exclusively features Nvidia G-Sync support on its incredible 16-inch OLED screen. Add a full set of creator-friendly ports and a bundled mouse, and you’re looking at a laptop that offers a great value even with its steep $4,399 starting price.
By comparison, the closest spec MacBook Pro 16-inch costs $3,599 and is cheaper only because it maxes out at 48GB of RAM, while the ProArt P16 configs start at 64GB. That much memory lets you play games with up to 32GB of video memory with DLSS 4.5 and DLSS 5.0, multi-frame generation, and full RTX ray tracing you won’t find on another SoC from AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm. Meanwhile, you can use that full 64GB of memory to power a local AI agent that completes tasks independently of the cloud.
Nvidia RTX has impressed me with its gaming prowess out of the gate, even without dedicated GDDR7 video RAM or any natively running games – all games currently run through Nvidia’s Prism emulation. But it feels like we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg in how performant these machines will be as more apps and games add native Windows on Arm support.
Full Review
💻 Thinner, lighter, faster. The Asus ProArt P16 is a truly thin 16-inch laptop. It measures just 0.63 inches at its thickest point, and it weighs only 3.9 pounds. That’s even lighter than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and this is a far more flexible device that can do work, gaming, and AI tasks on the go. Switching to a single SOC has let Asus create a laptop that’s 13% thinner and 16% lighter than the previous-generation ProArt P16.
🎬 Made to create. The Asus ProArt P16 sports a 2,880 x 1,800 OLED display that was made just to edit photos and videos. Not only do you get the pure blacks exclusive to an OLED screen, but this display gets plenty bright, up to 1,100 nits. HDR color rendering also reaches 100% of the DCI-P3 rating, and you can easily switch between sRGB and Display P3 color gamut modes in the MyAsus app.
🎮 Fantastic gaming – with limits. The Asus ProArt P16 and the smaller P14 are uniquely the only RTX Spark laptops equipped with a G-Sync display. This gives them an edge for tear-free PC gaming over all the other models powered by Nvidia’s new processor. I’ve had a fantastic time playing Gears of War E-Day at 75% scaled resolution and medium settings, using DLSS 4.5 on Balanced. Of course, turning on Multi-Frame Generation 3x helps push the frame rate up to 120, matching the screen’s refresh rate, and the extra latency cost feels minimal thanks to Nvidia Reflex.
The fact that RTX Spark handles gaming so well is a miracle, since every title runs on the device through Prism emulation. I had no problems even pushing Nvidia’s latest Path Tracing tech in 007: First Light while playing the game in fullscreen with medium settings and DLSS 4.5 set to Balanced. The only game that failed to start was Forza Horizon 6, but since it comes directly from Microsoft, I expect they’ll patch it for compatibility soon.
🕹️ Gaming on the cutting edge. 2026 has been a great year for gaming on thinner devices. Intel Panther Lake brought real +100fps gaming to Ultrabooks like the Asus Zenbook Duo, and now RTX Spark has brought high-end gaming to thin-and-light laptops. I wouldn’t say RTX Spark is ready to replace gaming laptops outright yet. After all, there’s a grand total of one recent game designed to run natively on Arm processors: Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.
Also, while the N1X chip in my sample and most higher-end RTX Spark devices offers the same number of 6144 CUDA cores as a mobile RTX 5070, it doesn’t have access to high-speed GDDR7 video memory. Instead, it taps into the SOC’s shared LPDDR5X memory pool that tops out at 9,400 Mbps. So even if you can have 12, 16, 24, or even 64GB of video memory, the RTX Spark can’t match a gaming laptop with a real Nvidia RTX 5070.
🤖 Bring your AI home. We’ve truly entered the age of agentic AI, and the RTX Spark processor is the perfect home to host them locally. AI has become such an integral part of Windows 11 that the OS will prompt you to choose an AI agent, Hermes, OpenClaw, or Perplexity, from the welcome home screen during initial setup. I’ve used my onboard agent for everything from finding an obscure PC setting to troubleshooting benchmarking and upscaling video from 1080p30 to 2160p60. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, as you can ask your agent to build anything from a smart home control bot to vibecoding your next app.
Should you buy the Asus ProArt PX16?
✅ Yes, if…
💻 You want a laptop that can do it all for work, gaming, and AI
🎮 You love a thin and light laptop with the graphical power to game
🎥 You’re a photographer, video shooter, or creator in general
🤖 You want to use AI agents while disconnected from the Internet
❌ No, if…
🍎 You abhor Windows 11 (get the MacBook Pro instead)
🙅♂️ You hate the idea of playing all your games through an emulator
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam