Nvidia is using South Korea's PC bangs to launch RTX Spark, a new superchip aimed at slim Windows laptops and compact desktops that can run AAA games at 1440p and over 100 frames per second while doubling as local AI machines. Jensen Huang unveiled the chip at GTC Taipei during COMPUTEX last week, then flew to Seoul to put it in front of the country's gaming community alongside KRAFTON, NC and reigning League of Legends World Champions T1. More than 100 Windows software providers and game developers are already building for the platform, including Riot Games, NetEase, Remedy Entertainment and XBOX.
RTX Spark is Nvidia's pitch for the era of personal AI agents on Windows PCs. The chip supports the full RTX stack, including the newly announced DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction with a second-generation transformer model, and is designed to deliver all-day battery life in laptops while running local generative AI workloads. Nvidia is framing it as the consolidation of 30 years of its graphics and accelerated-compute work into a single platform that ships in two form factors.
“Designed for local AI, creating and gaming, RTX Spark brings together 30 years of NVIDIA innovation to slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and small, ultraefficient desktop PCs.”— Jangho Park, Nvidia
The Korea rollout is deliberate. Korea is the country that turned PC bangs into the connective tissue of competitive gaming, and Nvidia marked 25 years of GeForce in the market in October with a free festival for gamers. Huang's Friday tour through Seoul was the follow-through: a high-visibility hardware launch staged in the venues where Korean players actually play.
Key facts
- 01Nvidia unveiled RTX Spark at GTC Taipei during COMPUTEX, then took the launch on tour through Seoul's PC bangs.
- 02The superchip targets 1440p at over 100 fps in AAA games with ray tracing, DLSS and Reflex on slim laptops.
- 03KRAFTON, NC, Riot Games and 100+ Windows software and game developers are building for RTX Spark.
- 04Huang demoed RTX Spark with six-time League of Legends World Champion Lee 'Faker' Sang-hyeok at T1 Base Camp.
- 05Nvidia is marking 25 years of GeForce in Korea, where it ran a free gamer festival in October.
The first stop was T1 Base Camp, the PC bang owned by esports team T1, where Huang met the team's League of Legends World Champion roster including six-time World Champion Lee 'Faker' Sang-hyeok. Nvidia and Riot Games used the event to confirm that both League of Legends and VALORANT are coming to RTX Spark, extending Riot's top two titles to the new slim-laptop class. T1 Base Camp visitors were entered to win RTX Spark laptops, signed merch and GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs.
Huang then moved into Gangnam, where he and KRAFTON Chairman Byung-gyu Chang showed up unannounced at Optimum Zone PC to demo PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS and Subnautica 2 on RTX Spark. The bigger reveal was PUBG Ally, an unreleased co-playable character built on Nvidia ACE that walked gamers through matches as an AI teammate. KRAFTON and Nvidia have been developing Ally as part of a longer push to make game characters behave more like collaborators than scripted NPCs.
At Portal PC, NC co-CEO Taekjin Kim joined Huang to demo CINDER CITY and AION 2 on RTX Spark systems. NC's relationship with Nvidia goes back to the Lineage franchise in the early 2000s and has since extended through Lineage 2, AION, Blade & Soul, AION 2 and the upcoming CINDER CITY. Gamers at Portal PC played a demo of CINDER CITY, NC's open-world MMO tactical shooter, on GeForce RTX hardware.
CINDER CITY will support DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and Super Resolution at launch and will run on both RTX Spark laptops and compact desktops when it ships later this year. That gives Nvidia a marquee Korean title locked to its newest upscaling stack on day one, with a hardware platform sized for the PC bangs the game will actually be played in. The combination matters because the PC bang is still the dominant install base decision-maker in Korean PC gaming.
The strategic read is that Nvidia is trying to define a new PC category before AMD, Intel or Qualcomm-led Arm laptops can claim it. RTX Spark is being pitched as a single chip that handles agentic AI workloads locally, drives ray-traced AAA gaming at 1440p100+, and fits in fanless or near-fanless industrial designs. Bundling that with KRAFTON's PUBG ecosystem, NC's MMO catalog, and Riot's competitive titles gives the launch a built-in software gravity well in Asia that competitors will struggle to match. Following Huang's earlier Seoul push to lock in Korea's AI supply chain, the PC bang tour rounds out the consumer side of the same campaign: Nvidia wants the country's chipmakers, game studios and players all running on its stack.
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