Surface Laptop Ultra hands-on review: the future for Nvidia RTX Spark and all Windows 11 ARM laptops
The most impressive MacBook Pro rival in years
💻 Surface Laptop Ultra is the most excitingly powerful Windows 11 laptop in years
🪙 Wrapped in a premium aluminum chassis that feels like one solid block of metal
📺 2000-nit 15-inch mini LED display is searingly bright with fantastic contrast
🫨 Haptic touchpad simulates clicks and adds a tactile confirmation while hovering over Windows 11 elements
💪 Ready for heavy creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro and Unreal Engine 5
🎮 Runs Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Fortnite, Pragmata, and more ray traced games at a smooth 60+ frames per second at full resolution
The Surface Laptop Ultra has gotten me the most excited I’ve been for a Surface product in years. Microsoft’s newest flagship laptop combines a premium all-aluminum design, a luxurious HDR mini-LED display, a haptic touchpad, and Nvidia’s promising new RTX Spark ARM processors, which should make it the strongest high-performance, AI-focused challenger to the MacBook Pro.
At Computex 2026, we’ve had hands-on time with this laptop, tackling intense creative workflows in Adobe Premiere and rendering an explorable virtual environment in Unreal Engine 5. The Surface Laptop Ultra has also proven itself to be a very capable gaming laptop, handily playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Alan Wake 2. Even through emulation, Pragmata and Fornite were perfectly playable on this laptop.
There’s still a huge mystery as too how much the Surface Laptop Ultra will cost when it arrives this fall, but the Surface Laptop Ultra seems like the most serious MacBook Pro competitor Microsoft or any Windows 11 laptop produce has ever produced.
Full Review
😍 A real beauty. The Surface Laptop Ultra is a beautiful piece of machined aluminum. There aren’t any gaps and hardly any screws to reveal that this thing is anything less than a solid block of milled aluminum. The chassis is also impressively thin at 18mm, but it appears to be even thinner thanks to its raised pedestal design. Despite all the power and Microsoft’s most powerful cooling system yet (more on that later), it weighs under 4.5 pounds, just like the MacBook Pro.
📺 2000-nit HDR display. Opening the lid, with a single finger, mind you, reveals an equally beautiful 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen with a resolution of 2880 × 1920 and 120Hz refresh rate. The display also delivers 4K TV-level HDR brightness at a maximum of 2,000 nits. It makes games look especially fantastic. I was blown away by how good the sun-drenched rainforest scenes from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looked on the Surface Laptop Ultra. Even this Windows 11 desktop that Microsoft chose shows how much contrast the Surface Laptop Ultra can display.
🫨 Haptic touchpad. The trackpad on the Surface Laptop Ultra is the largest Microsoft has put in any Surface device, and it now also vibrates with haptic feedback. What’s interesting is Microsoft doesn’t just use haptics to simulate a mouse click, but the trackpad also vibrates while you hover over the X-button to close applications. Alternatively, the haptics will shake when you bring a window to the top of the screen and drag it along different split desktop presets. Even though it’s entirely virtual, the haptics add a nice tactile confirmation while you’re interacting with elements in Windows. I hope Microsoft adds more in the near future.
🥊 A huge contender. The Nvidia RTX Spark is bolting out of the gate with some of the biggest specs we’ve seen for a laptop processor. It features a custom 20-core Grate Note CPU that promises up to 1 petaflop worth of AI performance. Nvidia says this is the first time a device has been powerful enough to run 120-billion-parameter AI models on-device rather than servers or systems with multiple GPUs.
The onboard graphics offer an equally impressive 6,144 Blackwell CUDA cores, which should closely match the graphics performance of an RTX 5070 laptop GPU, though with a maximum power draw of 80W. Configuration can also feature up to 128GB of shared memory; however, I also saw plenty of machines with just 64GB of RAM, and Nvidia has told journalists that there will be configs with as little as 16GB of RAM.
🎨 Creative workflows. Windows on ARM will be a hurdle for Microsoft and Nvidia to clear with the Surface Laptop Ultra and other RTX Spark laptops, but both companies are already working hard to ensure everything works when they launch this fall. On the smaller scale, Adobe is already optimizing Premiere Pro. Nvidia presented a shootout between Premiere Pro and Premiere Pro enhanced for RTX Spark, and the latter rendered a scene 2x faster. The RTX Spark will also have accelerated 4.2.2. video support, so you’ll be able to take footage straight from your Canon, Nikon, Sony, or DJI Pocket 4 and edit in full resolution without any stuttering, whereas current devices require down-rezed proxies to smoothly play back media.
I was also able to seamlessly fly around a five-kilometer square virtual environment in Unreal Engine 5, all running on a Surface Laptop Ultra. What was even more impressive was that the entire application was emulated using Nvidia’s Prisim software, which Nvidia claims adds only 5%-10% CPU overhead.
🎮 All the gaming-ready RTX features. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a Blackwell GPU that supports all of Nvidia’s major gaming features to date. That includes all of the DLSS 4.5 features, like the 2nd-gen transformer model, Multi-Frame Generation, Nvidia Reflex, and even the upcoming path tracing arriving on all Nvidia 50-series GPUs this August.
The sheer GPU power of the RTX Spark already allows the Surface Laptop Ultra to run Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at full resolution with well over 60 fps. All the games were running with Ray Tracing, or RTX turned on, DLSS set to Balanced, and 2x MFG, and hardly any latency. Native game support on ARM is still spotty, but that didn’t seem to be an issue as Pragmata and Fornite played without issue despite being emulated on the Surface Laptop Ultra.
💨 Proper cooling. A Surface Laptop Ultra running at full tilt sounds about as loud as a portable fan on full power. Microsoft told me the fans in this laptop are the biggest fans it’s ever put in a Surface device, giving it 2.5x that of Surface Laptop 8th Gen. Aside from bigger fans, Microsoft has carefully engineered its thermal solutions with a new copper cold plate and vents so the airflow can hit every component before the heat gets pushed out.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam