Nvidia RTX Spark encrypted firmware slows inference speed to 35% on Linux

Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops suffer severe performance degradation on Linux, with GPU inference speed dropping to just 35% of Windows performance (14 vs 65 tokens per second) due to encrypted firmware that only Windows can read. The issue stems from Nvidia's Platform Controllers and Framework, a Windows-only power management system that locks the GPU to 780 MHz on Linux instead of 2.2 GHz on Windows, while a real fix would require Nvidia to port this logic into its Linux driver. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) currently offers the practical workaround, maintaining full GPU performance while running Linux tools.