While a lot of the Microsoft Surface/NVIDIA co-event is talk of AI, and indeed RTX Spark isn't being marketed as a gaming platform so much, gaming still got a pretty big mention.
One of Microsoft's biggest franchises, Call of Duty, will be available on RTX Spark devices at some point in 2027. At first that might not sound like a big deal; after all, it's a Microsoft game on a Microsoft-powered platform.
But as with the Steam Deck and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X platform, the big sticking point has been anticheat support. Lots of games can be played on Windows on Arm already, and surprisingly well. But anticheat support is still in its infancy, and this news means that Activision's Ricochet is being developed to run on ARM64.
What can we take from this? Well, the view I'm taking as a Call of Duty player is that this is a pretty significant development for the future of the franchise. Sure, folks buying RTX Spark laptops and desktops in the foreseeable future are likely developers or AI enthusiasts first, but people still like to game.
Folks can talk about whether Ricochet is any good or not until they're blue in the face, but it's required to play modern Call of Duty titles on PC. Today, that means AMD and Intel-powered systems only because of the kernel-level anticheat.
Coming to RTX Spark means Ricochet is being developed to support ARM64, and in the longer term, that surely means not only systems using NVIDIA's chip. I still long to see a world where Snapdragon and RTX Spark chips are powering future handhelds, and I want those devices to be able to play my favorite game my hopeless addiction.
Failing that, at some point I know I'll be moving to Windows on Arm fully. Even if it's not for some years, given the price of everything, it's going to happen, and I want all my games on there.
Ricochet joins the likes of Epic's Easy Anti Cheat, Denuvo, and Battleye, all of which have plans to support Windows on Arm.
The other thing we can take is that it was very deliberately announced as "Call of Duty." Not Modern Warfare 4, which is the next game to launch on October 23 this year. 2027 is a big window of time, so it is possible it could take until next year's game to get everything up and running.
Then there are the legacy titles that also use Ricochet. Will these be included, or just the most current release at the time?
In any case, I'm glad to hear this news. Even if Windows on Arm isn't going to be a true gamer's platform for a while yet, we have to start somewhere. And this is a big step in the right direction.
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