Microsoft used its Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on Wednesday to give full details on the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch machine built on Nvidia‘s new RTX Spark chip. The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599, pre-orders are open now, and it goes on sale October 16.
The laptop matters for PC players because it pairs an Arm chip with graphics in the range of a dedicated card. Microsoft says the RTX Spark GPU performs on par with a GeForce RTX 5070, and the company ran Gears of War: E-Day on the device during the show. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on stage for a conversation.
Surface Laptop Ultra specs and design
The Surface Laptop Ultra has a 15-inch mini-LED display with a 3:2 aspect ratio and up to 2,000 nits of brightness. Its trackpad is 30 percent larger than the one on the seventh-generation Surface Laptop. The chassis weighs under 4.5 pounds and measures less than 18mm thick.
Microsoft claims the new model has 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch seventh-gen Surface Laptop, along with all-day battery life. The company is pitching it against Apple’s MacBook Pro, and the port selection reflects that. There is USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a full-size SD card reader. A magnetic charging option also works through a regular USB-C port.
What the RTX Spark chip brings
RTX Spark is an Arm-based system-on-a-chip with 20 CPU cores and support for up to 128GB of unified memory. Nvidia says it draws no more than 80W, less than other AI-focused chips. Its neural processing unit is fast enough to meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirements.
For games, the chip supports ray tracing, DLSS and Nvidia Reflex. Beyond Gears of War: E-Day, Microsoft said Call of Duty will run on the Surface Laptop Ultra later this year. Game compatibility has been a weak spot for Arm-based Windows laptops, so official support for two big Xbox franchises tells buyers what the hardware can handle.
Microsoft also priced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a mini PC aimed at heavier AI workloads. It starts at $5,999, and pre-orders are already open.
Copilot gets more control over Windows
Much of the event focused on developers. Microsoft said it wants Windows to be “the most secure platform for AI agents,” and it described a hybrid model where AI runs both locally and in the cloud. The company introduced its agentic platform, Project Solara, earlier this year and has since added more automation to the Copilot app.
With user permission, Copilot will be able to take actions based on local files. It will run AI models on the device and draw on cloud compute when it needs more power. It can also generate apps and widgets. The Copilot icon now has a face, too.
Starting this fall, Windows search on the taskbar will handle thousands of quick actions. Users can switch on dark mode, take a screenshot, change the volume, get answers to questions or send text messages straight from the search box.
Meanwhile, a new “Get Started” tool aims to make AI agents easier to set up in Windows. Agents available through it will include Portable Computer, which runs locally without cloud credits, and Muse, which will arrive as a native Windows app.