Microsoft has announced the Surface Laptop Ultra pricing will start at $2,599 and it will arrive on October 16. The full range of RTX Spark laptops from Asus, Dell, MSI, Lenovo, and HP are also available for preorder now and will ship on October 16.
The Surface Laptop Ultra has long been promised to be the most powerful Windows computer yet designed for everything from local AI computing, creative workloads, and ray traced gaming and it’s all thanks to Nvidia’s new CPU; the RTX Spark.
In our first hands-on with the Surface Laptop Ultra we were able to do everything from playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at 60fps with ray tracing to exploring a city in Unreal Engine 5. The biggest promise Microsoft has made with Nvidia’s new RTX Spark processors is that it will bring AI processing to a local level.
Hybrid Intelligence
With this new machine AI is fully baked into Windows 11, even down to the Windows Search experience.
Microsoft also pushed hybrid intelligence, which allows Copilot to access your files, take actions and use local AI models as well as those on the cloud. In this new structure, Copilot will only tap into the cloud for difficult AI tasks, while running local models to save your precious tokens.
Beyond Copilot, Windows 11 will be able to host multiple AI agents locally including Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, Perplexity, and even Facebook Muse.
PC juggernaut
Along with ushering the new age of AI built into Windows 11, the Surface Laptop Ultra promises a new level of PC performance. The RTX Spark N1X chip inside the Surface Laptop Ultra is a beast, featuring a custom 20-core Grace CPU with a petaflop of AI performance. The RTX Blackwell GPU also adds 6144 CUDA cores (the same number as an mobile RTX 5070 GPU) with all of Nvidia’s latest graphics tech including DLSS 4.5, 2nd-gen transformer model, Multi-Frame Generation, Nvidia Reflex, and path tracing.
Those serious gaming chops will allow the Surface Laptop Ultra to run Gears of War: E-Day and Microsoft announced Call of Duty is also coming to RTX Spark systems this year.
To keep up with all this performance, Microsoft claims its improved the cooling on the Surface Laptop Ultra to give it 2.5X the thermal capacity of existing Surface notebooks. It also claims to maintain over 99% of its power while on battery.
Lastly, Microsoft announced a new Magnetic Connect charging adapter that still uses a normal USB-C port, one-upping Apple’s Magsafe charger.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam