RTX Spark Draws Near: Nvidia Brings Neural Texture Compression to Windows on Arm

Nvidia has adapted its Neural Texture Compression (NTC) technology for Windows on Arm, ahead of the general release of its RTX Spark platform. NTC was first demonstrated in May at GTC 2026, showing a reduction in video memory usage from 6.5 GB to just 970 MB in certain scenes. Traditional games use block compression formats like BCn (e.g., BC5, BC6, BC7) for 4x4 pixel blocks processed by the GPU, but Nvidia has trained small neural networks to produce the required pixel representation and texture appearance at significantly smaller sizes. NTC reduces video memory usage by emulating textures, allowing either lower memory consumption or improved material quality. Nvidia is expanding the software ecosystem for RTX Spark, with SEGA agreeing to release games for the platform. Nvidia has already started shipping a preliminary version of the CUDA Toolkit for RTX Spark, including support for Windows on Arm, and now NTC support has been added. RTX Spark comes in two configurations: with 6144 CUDA cores or 5120 CUDA cores, both using the Blackwell architecture, paired with a 20-core Arm processor and up to 128 GB of unified LPDDR5X memory.