GeForce RTX now runs on ARM PCs in China’s DIY builds

Nvidia’s first official GeForce driver for Windows on ARM has already been pushed beyond its intended use. Chinese enthusiasts have found a way to run it with desktop GeForce RTX graphics cards, even though Nvidia does not officially support those configurations yet.

One test used a Huawei Qingyun W510 workstation with a 24-core Huawei Kunpeng 920 processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB of memory connected over PCIe 4.0 x8. To install Windows 11, the researchers had to rely on an open ACPI patch, since Huawei does not support that OS on the platform.

In a second experiment, enthusiasts successfully ran a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti on the compact Radxa Orion O6 ARM board.

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Performance is still well short of typical Windows PC levels. The main bottlenecks are relatively weak ARM CPUs and the need to run most modern games through x64 emulation in Windows on ARM. In testing:

• Genshin Impact at Full HD delivered about 20 fps
• Black Myth: Wukong averaged about 21 fps, ranging from 3 to 33 fps depending on the scene
• The Star Wars Reflections ray tracing tech demo ran at 23–25 fps

Synthetic benchmarks looked better. The RTX 4060 scored 43,530 in 3DMark Night Raid, 32,370 in Solar Bay, and 2252 in Speed Way.

Time Spy, which currently runs only through x64 emulation, returned 6369 points. For comparison, the same card in a standard x86 PC usually scores around 10,400 points.

The setup also worked with professional software. Blender detected the RTX 4060 through CUDA without issue, and GPU utilization during rendering reached roughly 89%.

According to the source, Nvidia’s universal driver could potentially make Windows on ARM compatible with nearly all discrete GeForce generations, from the RTX 20 series through the latest RTX 50 series.