Call of Duty on RTX Spark Arrives in 2027

Microsoft closed the gaming section of its October 7 Windows and Surface event with a single line: Call of Duty on RTX Spark is coming in 2027. No month, no title and no reason for the wait were given, in a keynote that otherwise spent its 90 minutes on AI agents and local models.

That leaves the biggest shooter on the platform’s roadmap without the thing every other publisher got this week. RTX Spark pairs an Arm-based CPU with NVIDIA Blackwell graphics and runs Windows 11 on Arm, which makes game compatibility, not chip speed, the question buyers will actually be weighing. In its own account of the event, NVIDIA states that RTX Spark players get AAA games at 1440p and over 100 frames per second with DLSS 5, Reflex and G-SYNC. That is a vendor claim about hardware it builds, and nothing on a stage settles what one specific game does with an anti-cheat driver on an Arm core.

Why Call of Duty on RTX Spark slips to 2027

Microsoft did not explain the timing. What it did show is that the compatibility work is real and uneven. NVIDIA has spent the year signing publishers up, and it has been working with Electronic Arts on native EA Javelin anti-cheat for RTX Spark. Anti-cheat runs deep inside a multiplayer game, and it is the part of a modern shooter that a new platform has to get right. EA, Ubisoft and Embark were the publishers named at Gamescom in August, joining Riot Games, KRAFTON, NetEase and Xbox from Computex in May. Microsoft has not said whether anti-cheat is the work still outstanding, and it took no questions on the subject.

The launch list is unusually broad. Microsoft says hundreds of PC games, AAA releases and indie titles alike, will run when RTX Spark laptops ship, and it demonstrated Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Minecraft, Alan Wake II, Valorant and World of Warcraft on the hardware. Gears of War: E-Day, which shipped on October 6, ran at 60 frames per second on Ultra settings. Microsoft did not say at what resolution, or whether upscaling and frame generation were switched on.

The performance numbers are still the companies’ own. Jensen Huang said on stage that more than 1,200 applications have been tested on the platform, and NVIDIA rates the chip at one petaflop of FP4 AI performance with up to 128GB of unified memory. The silicon is a Blackwell RTX GPU of up to 6,144 cores joined to an up-to 20-core Grace CPU at 600 GB/s. The two companies also count software differently: NVIDIA’s product page claims over 1,000 accelerated applications and games, which takes in everything RTX speeds up, while Microsoft’s hundreds refers to titles that run on the new hardware on day one.

Reviews land with the laptops rather than before them, so the first independent frame rates for these games on Windows on Arm arrive in the middle of October. That is three months before the game most of this audience actually cares about was supposed to arrive.

The hardware lands before the shooter does. RTX Spark laptops from Microsoft, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI opened for preorder on October 7 and ship on October 16, in machines Microsoft names as the ASUS ProArt P16 and P14, the Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition, the HP OmniBook Ultra 16, the Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1 and the MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+. Compact desktops follow in November, and Microsoft has not announced Philippine pricing or a local release window for any of them.

We have tracked the platform as it reached this market, including the RTX Spark laptops ASUS lined up for the Philippines, and we covered Modern Warfare 4’s October 23 launch and its DLSS 4.5 support in a separate story. The 2027 title is a different game in every sense, and it is the one that will tell us whether Windows on Arm is finally ready for the games people play together rather than the ones they play alone.

Sources: Microsoft Windows and Surface event, Microsoft newsroom, Windows Experience blog, NVIDIA event post, NVIDIA RTX Spark, NVIDIA anti-cheat, VideoCardz.