What shipped
Perplexity has made Portable Computer, the version of its Computer agent that runs on the user’s own hardware, available in its Windows app on compatible Nvidia GeForce RTX PCs and RTX PRO workstations, Nvidia announced on 14 September. The machine needs an RTX graphics card with at least 24GB of video memory.
Portable Computer plans and carries out multi-step tasks using local models: analysing data, pulling information together across files and handling recurring work. Perplexity first released it for Linux, including Nvidia’s DGX Spark systems, and VentureBeat reported at the time that Windows would follow in September. Nvidia said support for its DGX Station is coming soon.
The model and the hardware bar
The default model is Qwen 3.8 27B, which Nvidia described as post-trained to work with Perplexity Computer and optimised for RTX GPUs. It comes from Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen family. How-To Geek reported that support for Nvidia’s own Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is also on the way.
The 24GB memory floor is what keeps this out of reach of most laptops. VentureBeat put the baseline at roughly an RTX 3090 or newer, a card class usually found in high-end gaming desktops and workstations.
Local first, cloud when allowed
Each task starts on the local machine. If the local model cannot complete a step, the agent can ask a cloud model for help, but only with the user’s permission, according to Nvidia. VentureBeat reported that Perplexity also classifies personal information before any data leaves the device, and that the agent runs inside operating-system-level sandboxing.
The Windows release includes a built-in browser and Perplexity’s SPACE sandbox tools, and connects to Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Google Drive, Gmail, Slack and GitHub, Nvidia said.
The pitch has two parts. The first is privacy: sensitive files stay on the device. The second is cost: work completed locally does not consume Perplexity Computer credits, so a long-running agent task on a user’s own GPU costs electricity rather than tokens.
Who can use it
Portable Computer is available to Perplexity Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max subscribers, VentureBeat reported. Perplexity has not published separate pricing for the local version.
Why it matters
Most agent products run entirely in the cloud and bill by usage. Portable Computer is one of the more complete attempts to package the whole stack, the agent harness, a local model, inference, tools, app connectors and a sandbox, into a single maintained app that runs on a PC.
The open question is quality. A 27-billion-parameter local model is far smaller than the frontier models behind cloud agents, and the escalation-to-cloud design is an admission that some steps will need them. How often a real task stays fully local is the number that will decide whether the privacy and cost argument holds.
