Nvidia's new RTX bundle now comes with a free copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Goodbye Wolfenstein and Control, hello COD
If you've yet to buy an Nvidia RTX graphics card, there's a new game bundle in town. Previously, Nvidia were giving away free copies of Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood when you bought any qualifying RTX or RTX Super GPU, laptop or desktop, but starting today until November 18th they're going to be lobbing in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with them instead. As you may remember, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is yet another of this year's big blockbusters with confirmed ray tracing support. However, you also may remember from last month's big Gamescom trailer for it that they had to draw great big green boxes round the ray tracing bits because they were all so darn subtle.
At first glance, this feels like a bit of a bum deal compared to Nvidia's previous free game bundle, if only because that got you two free games instead of one. Admittedly, there's still no word on when Wolfenstein is even getting its promised ray tracing support - the last I heard from Nvidia was that it was scheduled for an upcoming patch, but there's still no exact date for it yet - so perhaps the drop from just a single free game isn't really that bad in the grand scheme of things.
However, even if we discount Wolfenstein for a minute, I still don't think Call of Duty offers quite the same ray tracing wow factor as the exquisite Control. As you might have seen from my Control RTX ray tracing guide, Remedy's telekinetic shooter looks absolutely fantastic with ray tracing switched on, and for me is arguably the best RTX showcase game yet - even more so than Metro Exodus.
Call of Duty's RTX effects, on the other hand, have so far failed to make much of an impression. Yes, there's only been a single RTX trailer for the game so far (the one above with the green boxes), so it's possible there might be more spectacular-looking segments of it that we simply haven't seen yet. At the moment, though, it only looks like they're going to be adding ray traced shadows to Modern Warfare (a bit like they did with Shadow of the Tomb Raider), so I'm not exactly holding out much hope that it will look nearly as jaw-dropping as either Control or Metro.
There's also the issue how the game's performance is going to be affected by having ray tracing switched on as well. I'll be taking a more in-depth look at all this nearer to the game's launch, of course, although at least in this case it should hopefully avoid falling into the same performance-related potholes as Battlefield V did thanks to the added bonus of having Nvidia's speed-boosting adaptive shading tech.