' Cool And Everything, But Don't Do It.' Sage Advice For Anyone...

Doom and Crysis are joined by a new game in a holy trinity of 'Will it run?'

Let's say you've just spent the better part of $4,000 on a highly specialised development machine that's designed for a single purpose: AI. Nothing about the device says it's for gaming. So it's only natural that you'd do exactly the same as one Redditor did, and try to get it to run Cyberpunk 2077.

Well, they did more than just try; they actually succeeded. In a post on Reddit, user Retrotom explains the steps they followed to get Nvidia's DGX Spark to natively run Cyberpunk 2077. The little 'AI-supercomputer-in-a-box' sports a GB10 APU, which has a 20-core Arm CPU and a Blackwell-based GPU with 6,144 shader cores.

The latter is, to all intents and purposes, the same GPU that's in a GeForce RTX 5070. Same number of shaders, TMUs, ROPs, ray tracing units, tensor cores, and L2 cache. Where they differ is in VRAM and power. While the GB10 sports 128 GB of LPDDR5x unified memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus for 273 GB/s of bandwidth, the GB205 in the RTX 5070 is home to 12 GB of GDDR7.

AI models need lots of RAM, which is why the DGX Spark is so heavily loaded compared to the graphics card, but as the RTX 5070 is for gaming, it uses much faster memory, with a peak memory bandwidth of 672 GB/s.

Nvidia's RTX 5070 has a standard power limit of 250 W, and while there are no given figures for the Spark, it comes with a 240 W power supply. That supplies power for everything inside the box: the CPU, the GPU, the mountain of RAM, and the 4 TB SSD. Clearly, the GB10's GPU isn't able to claim all 240 watts, so it'll be more power-limited than the 5070.

Hence why Retrotom's screenshot of Cyberpunk 2077 in action on the Spark only shows a performance of 44 fps, at 1080p on Medium settings. The Redditor does say that it averages around 50 fps, which doesn't sound too bad, until you realise that an RTX 5070 can hit 72 fps on average and when using the RT Ultra preset.

The GB10's GPU might be an RTX 5070 in disguise, but it's far more power-limited and bandwidth-restricted than the GeForce chip.

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But even so, that's still pretty good for a device that is absolutely not designed or even expected to be running games. The DGX Spark's operating system is Linux, but since the CPU is Arm-based, Retrotom had to use Box64 (an x86-to-Arm emulator) in order to install Steam, load Cyberpunk 2077 and

Source: PC Gamer