Microsoft says “hundreds” of AAA and indie games will run on NVIDIA RTX Spark PCs from day one, though Call of Duty will not be one of them. Windows and Devices head Pavan Davuluri made the claim at Microsoft’s Windows and Surface event on October 7, where he also said Call of Duty support is coming in 2027. Apparently, no reason was given for the wait, and Microsoft didn’t say which Call of Duty title they meant. That is an awkward gap, since Activision is a Microsoft-owned studio and the RTX Spark-equipped Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 with shipping set for October 16.
Anti-cheat is probably the holdup, although Microsoft hasn’t confirmed that. RTX Spark uses an Arm-based CPU, so games run on Windows on Arm, and kernel-level anti-cheat drivers have to be rebuilt for it. Call of Duty relies on Activision’s own Ricochet anti-cheat, which, as far as we know, only works on x86 systems today. Davuluri did show Gears of War: E-Day running at 60 FPS on the Surface Laptop Ultra. However, the resolution and upscaling settings were not disclosed, so the figure says little about real performance. It also isn’t clear how many of those “hundreds” of games are native Arm builds and how many run through emulation. NVIDIA released its RTX Spark toolkit for Windows-on-Arm game development in July, and EA, Embark, and Ubisoft committed titles such as Apex Legends, ARC Raiders, and Anno 117: Pax Romana at Gamescom.