On October 7 Microsoft and NVIDIA ran a joint Windows and Surface event, and the gaming segment closed on one line: Call of Duty is coming to RTX Spark devices at some point in 2027. No title was named. No month was given. For most people that is a laptop story. For anyone who plays on PC it is an anti-cheat story, because RICOCHET is the thing standing between a machine and a lobby.
Reported. The RTX Spark announcement is solid and widely covered, but the anti-cheat part is a reporter's inference rather than an Activision statement, and Windows Central frames it that way itself. Treat the 2027 window as a direction of travel, not a date you can plan a roster around.
Windows Central made the connection first, and was honest about the shape of it. Call of Duty on PC runs a kernel-level anti-cheat driver that exists for x86 silicon. Windows on Arm machines can already run plenty of games well; what they cannot run is kernel anti-cheat. So if Call of Duty is genuinely booting on an Arm part in 2027, RICOCHET is being built for ARM64. That is a reasonable read. It is still a read, not a statement from the people who ship the driver.
Why Hardcore SnD cares
This is not a frames-per-second question. It is an eligibility question. Activision's own support article spells out the current PC security floor, and the consequence of missing it is not a warning banner. A failed attestation means restricted access to certain modes, Ranked Play named specifically, plus the possibility of being dropped into a separate matchmaking pool. Which processors RICOCHET will talk to is therefore the same question as which processors can play competitive Call of Duty.
- The supported list is narrow today. Activision lists Intel 8th Gen or newer with Intel PTT, or AMD Ryzen 2000 series or newer with AMD CPU fTPM, on Windows 10 22H2 or later. There is no Arm entry anywhere on that page.
- Ranked is the part that gets taken away. Attestation failure is written up as a mode restriction, not a cosmetic one, and Ranked Play is called out by name. A roster member on a machine that cannot attest is a roster member who cannot play the lane that counts.
- A wider floor cuts both ways. More eligible hardware means more people who can enter a competitive lobby, and it also means a brand new class of device for the anti-cheat team to defend. Neither effect lands before 2027 on this reporting.
What is not confirmed
Everything past the announcement itself. Activision has not said RICOCHET is being ported. Nobody has said which Call of Duty title arrives on RTX Spark, and Windows Central points out the wording was deliberately the franchise name rather than Modern Warfare 4. Nobody has said whether an Arm machine would pass attestation and get Ranked access or sit in a restricted pool. Nobody has said what happens to the legacy titles RICOCHET also covers. A 2027 window is also long enough to mean next year's game rather than this one.
What would verify it
One thing, and it is cheap to check: the Activision Support page on TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. The day Arm, Qualcomm, or NVIDIA Grace hardware appears in that CPU support list, this stops being an inference and becomes a requirement you can plan around. A published RTX Spark line in the Call of Duty PC specs, or a RICOCHET post naming ARM64, would do the same job. Until one of those lands, the honest position is that a hardware announcement implies an anti-cheat change and nothing more.
A promise about hardware is not a promise about Ranked access. Watch the support page, not the keynote.