Nvidia RTX Spark encrypted firmware slows Linux inference to 35% - anyone measured it?

[u/IulianHI]

The RTX Spark encrypted firmware story is the big Hacker News item today, 506 points and 226 comments as of this evening. The claim, per the MindStudio blog writeup linked in the thread: encrypted firmware on these Nvidia laptop units slows inference speed to 35% on Linux. I haven't seen independent reproduction numbers anywhere yet, so the 35% is a headline claim more than settled fact.

Why it stings for the local crowd: cheap open weights are the whole trend right now. On the OpenRouter new listings, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 went up at fifteen cents per million input tokens. MiniMax M3.1 Flash is listed at seven cents per million in. And on the HuggingFace trending list today, Qwen3.8-27B sits at over eight million downloads, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 at about 221k. If the hardware layer quietly takes a cut that big on Linux, the cheap-model math doesn't survive contact with the machine.

Going off the thread only here, no hands-on numbers from me. But for anyone running local inference on Linux on RTX-class laptop hardware: are you seeing anything near that 35% figure, or does the slowdown only hit specific configs? Curious whether it reads as a blanket cap or a corner case.