Nvidia says RTX Spark chip will support all major anti-cheat and DRM technologies — Fortnite, Valorant, Denuvo, and more to work natively with Windows on Arm

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Solving one of the biggest hurdles of a non-x86 platform.

Jensen Huang with RTX spark
(Image credit: Getty / Bloomberg)

Nvidia announced its new RTX Spark Superchip this week, opening the door for a new era of Windows on Arm computing. While the show focused mostly on agentic AI, gaming is another big selling point for the platform. As such, both Nvidia and Microsoft are working with developers around the world to bring popular anti-cheat software and DRM support to the RTX Spark natively.

It's ironic that Windows is the harbinger of such a development when the issue has been largely associated with Windows alternatives to begin with. For instance, Linux gaming has always been held back by the fact that some games simply won't work on the OS due to the lack of anti-cheat software. Games like Fortnite, Valorant, Rocket League, and more won't even boot.

Arm-based devices raise another challenge. Since most of these games are compiled for x86, they have to be emulated through Microsoft's Prism translation layer. This already incurs a performance loss, but because emulation does not grant access to low-level components of the OS, anti-cheat or DRM software can't run even on Windows — and that's exactly what's changing with the advent of RTX Spark.

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In a briefing attended by Tom's Hardware, the company confirmed the challenge of native ARM anti-cheat and said it is working to bring support for Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, Denuvo, and more. While the games themselves will still be emulated, the anti-cheat software can run natively, allowing the games to boot. "Today, native anti-cheat solutions from partners like Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye, expanded Prism emulator compatibility, and XBOX PC app support means players will have access to a deep catalog of Windows PC games," a Windows blog announcement stated.

If these developers decide to release native Arm versions of their games, then we'll see an even bigger improvement for the platform, but that's not happening today.

To be clear, this is a joint effort between Microsoft, Nvidia, and the game studios, so don't expect Linux to get any better; across Arm and x86, Windows is the unifier. You may be wondering why something like this didn't happen with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series, and the answer is rather straightforward. Those devices simply weren't popular enough to warrant such a massive investment.

Realistically speaking, Nvidia is the only company in the world with enough leverage and resources to be able to pull off a transition like this. It can convince developers to port their anti-cheat software just so it can work on the fancy new chip. That being said, Epic Games did add native ARM64 support for Snapdragon X devices last year, but that's an exception to the rule since it was limited to only Fortnite.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • erazog
    Qualcomm already has a number of anti-cheat solutions already supported so the articles claim that Nvidia is the only one capable of this simply isn't true.

    Arguably this helps Qualcomm more than it helps Nvidia as its products are priced for the majority of the laptop market.

    I cannot see gamers buying very expensive RTX Spark AI development systems like these laptops.
    Reply
  • hwertz
    Don't care about Windows on ARM. But, Qualcomm has taken the ridiculous path of foregoing good Linux support for their ARM systems. I've used a ARM Chromebook (with a Tegra K1) with 'Chrubuntul and it was fantastic, Linux on ARM was fully mature even 5 or 10 years ago, and Nvidia has excellent Linux support for their ARMs as well as excellent GPU and compute support on ARM (I mean they'd better, the dgx supercomputer line runs linux on arm, as well as embedded, industrial use, car use for entertainment systems and 'driver assistance' vision stuff, etc.) I could use qemu to run the 1 or 2 applications I didn't have native (fex86 and fex64 do this MUCH better now, and ARM version of steam builds this in for that matter...) Only downside (for some people who hate this) is using Nvidia drivers, but I've always found them performant, and the ARM drivers are no exception.
    Reply
  • Daelith
    So, not only are you taking a performance hit from the prism layer, but they want to compound it with Denuvo?
    Reply
  • hwertz
    Daelith said:
    So, not only are you taking a performance hit from the prism layer, but they want to compound it with Denuvo?
    Well, I'd prefer no Denuvo myself. But for the game aficionado, you'll otherwise have people complaining the games don't work, giving these machines a 'black mark' for other buyers; or they know why it's not working and go straight to the high seas.

    Inconvenient for those who do just want to buy their games and play, and the seller losing sales to 'it doesn't work' returns (and people not buying it since they know it won't work) plus those ironically lost to piracy who would have bought it otherwise, and the vendor having a system that plays games unless it doesn't. Versus making sure it works on there, where it's the same status quo as on x86-64 pretty much.

    Personally as a Linux user (on x86-64) the vast majority of games work, apparently Denuvo works, EAC works, whatever Once Human uses, I thought this extra thread or module was sure using some CPU time and found it was mapping the memory of all the other processes running as the same user (i.e. all it could access) and (if I recall) running ptrace on some, presumably analyzing it for cheats. Who knew from inside wine you could map out the linux processes and whatever? I have no idea if it was making any sense of what it saw, or just didn't see the cheats it was looking for so it didn't flag anything, but whichever, I had no anticheat related issues.
    Reply
  • descartes13
    The article claims that Rocket League does not support Linux as a result of EAC. This is false - see "Steam Deck and Linux are also supported, so you can keep playing on your preferred hardware" and should be corrected.
    Reply
  • Notton
    Fortnite and Rocket League run natively on Switch1/2, which are Nvidia Tegra ARM SoCs internally.

    Valorant is the only one worth mentioning out of the three because it doesn't have a Switch native build.
    Reply