Anyone running Rhino 8 on an RTX Spark / Windows on Arm machine yet?

Rhino Windows Hardware
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1

The first NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops started shipping this month — 20-core Arm CPU, Blackwell GPU, up to 128 GB unified memory, Windows 11 on Arm. On paper it looks like a strong Rhino machine, but as far as I can tell Rhino for Windows is still x86-only, so it would run through Microsoft’s Prism translation layer.

A few things I’d like to understand before committing to one:

  1. Has anyone run Rhino 8 on RTX Spark (or a Snapdragon X machine) and can share how the viewport, meshing, and Grasshopper feel compared to an x86 laptop?
  2. Do Grasshopper plugins and other third-party plugins load fine under translation, or are there known breakages?
  3. Is there any public plan for a native Windows Arm64 build, the way the Mac build went Apple Silicon?

I’m weighing an RTX Spark against an x86 workstation and Rhino is the deciding factor. If nobody has numbers yet, I’ll likely get one anyway and will post what I find here.

Thanks!

2

Hi vbc -
I can only answer this one:

No, there are no such plans.
From what we have seen so far, there doesn’t seem to be a performance impact from running through the translation layer.
I run Rhino 9 on an ARM PC (with a Qualcomm GPU) and that works fine. I occasionally (rarely) run Rhino 8 on this PC and I only notice the viewport titles not being there and picture objects displaying all black. That’s more a driver issue than a hardware issue, and I have no experience with NVIDIA’s OpenGL drivers for their Spark hardware.
-wim

3

Unless you want to run larger AI models on your machine (meaning you’d select a versions with large amount of RAM), it’s not worth it.

Aside from rhino, what else do you want to use it for?

4

Thanks Wim, good to know. Does that hold for the CPU-heavy side too — meshing large models, booleans, big Grasshopper definitions — or mainly viewport and everyday use? That’s the part I’d expect translation to show up in.

5

There are very few people for whom they make sense, definitely not anyone who wants to simply run something like Rhino.

6

Agreed. Doesn’t seem to make much for Rhino only, unless you really need the memory.

The GPU is basically a 5070 in spec, so hardly remarkable in itself. Other than Arm-core addiction, it doesn’t seem all that fabulous.

It seems to be an activity to use brand power to sell rather specifically targeted devices.

7

I think the major benefit right now could be the potential lower power consumption.

As reference my iPhone (13pro) has a graphic card that has the equivalent power (terra flops) as a GeForce 1050. But while the 1050 draws around 75 watts the iphone only draws 4 watts. That’s about 1/20th of the consumption. In the same manner mac’s M chips runs on Arm and can be used a full workday on battery, even for 3D work or video editing.

So if that’s the case for the Spark as well then I would like to upgrade to a silent, cool laptop that can work off grid for 8 hours. But a quick search shows that it doesn’t seem to be the case unfortunately.

8

That somehow sounds too good to be true.

9

It seems to be a 5070 from the spec sheet, but rumour is it benchmarks more like a 3060. This could be due to the CPU though.