Developer gets Nvidia RTX 4060 working on Windows 11 ARM

Until now, Windows on ARM PCs have not supported Nvidia’s desktop GPUs, largely because the company had not released a public Windows ARM64 driver. Nvidia now has an ARM64 driver through its RTX Spark project, but it is intended for RTX Spark systems, not existing desktop GeForce GPUs.

That changes now, as a developer has achieved a breakthrough and got an RTX 4060 working on Windows 11 ARM, thanks to the Nvidia RTX Spark project.

First spotted by Windows Latest, a developer has managed to use an Nvidia RTX 4060 with a Huawei Qingyun desktop, which runs a Kunpeng 920 processor. For those unaware, the Kunpeng 920 is an Arm-based chip, similar to the chips inside smartphones or the new Snapdragon X Elite.

“Successfully driving an NVIDIA discrete graphics card on a Huawei Kunpeng 920 running Windows 11 ARM. Hardware: Huawei Qingyun W510 (Kunpeng 920) + RTX 4060,” the developer wrote in a post on the Bilibili forum, translated using Google Translate.

“Graphics card function is normal, no video output signal, suitable for use with streaming,” he added.

I watched the video, which is in Chinese, and spotted some interesting details. The device appears to be a Huawei Qingyun W510 ARM workstation with a Kunpeng 920 processor, 32GB of DDR4 memory, and an RTX 4060 with 8GB of VRAM.

While Windows 11 on ARM appears to work well with the RTX 4060, there are certain limitations, and it is almost obvious that you cannot use it as a daily driver. For example, certain games simply do not work. Also, given the x64 translation, you are almost certain to experience a major performance loss.

Getting Windows 11 to boot was the first challenge

As you might be aware, Huawei cannot work with US-based companies, which means the Kunpeng 920 is not optimized for Windows. It can either run Huawei’s Linux-based HarmonyOS or another Linux distribution.

This also means Windows does not support the ACPI tables and hardware configurations found in Huawei systems. ACPI needs to be compatible for Windows to communicate with the hardware, processor, power management, and connected devices.

Ultimately, the developer used an open-source patch to correct the ACPI tables, which allowed Windows on ARM to boot successfully.

However, getting Windows to work with the Kunpeng 920 was only half the problem, as GeForce drivers are built for x64 processors from Intel and AMD. Although Windows 11 can translate many x64 apps to run on ARM, it cannot translate kernel-level drivers. That is also why we have not seen similar experiments.

First, the RTX 4060 was connected using a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface, and the developer extracted a native Windows ARM64 Nvidia driver from the RTX Spark software and installed it on the desktop RTX 4060. Windows then successfully detected the graphics card and enabled hardware acceleration, DirectX 12, and Vulkan.

The driver also passed Windows’ driver checks, although the setup is still unofficial and not supported by Nvidia.

The developer says the driver is based on Nvidia’s unified architecture, which means it could theoretically support other RTX graphics cards, including the RTX 20, 30, 40, and 50 series.

How well does the RTX 4060 work with Windows 11 ARM64?

Unsurprisingly, it is barely usable, as the performance is poor. The RTX 4060 itself appears to work correctly, but gaming performance is heavily limited by the Huawei Kunpeng 920 processor.

Most Windows games are built for x64 processors, so Windows must translate them to ARM64 while they are running. The Kunpeng 920 also has weak single-core performance compared to modern desktop processors. As a result, the GPU spends much of its time waiting for the CPU.

• Genshin Impact ran at 1080p and averaged around 20 FPS
• The Black Myth: Wukong benchmark ran at approximately 20 to 25 FPS.
• The Star Wars Reflections demo ran at around 23 to 25 FPS.

A third demo failed to activate ray tracing, likely because of a minor driver compatibility or GPU detection problem.

The biggest problem is that the system cannot output video directly to a monitor. The Huawei motherboard lacks proper Windows drivers, so the developer had to use Sunshine and Moonlight to remotely stream the Windows desktop and gameplay to another device.

The post Developer gets Nvidia RTX 4060 working on Windows 11 ARM appeared first on Windows Latest