Western Digital is working with Call of Duty to reimagine three high-performance products from the WD_BLACK portfolio, bringing gamers three special edition storage drives that encapsulate the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War look and feel with the added bonus of in-game Call of Duty points.1 These three products include the WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive, WD_BLACK P50 Game Drive SSD and the recently announced WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD featuring PCIe Gen 4 technology.

"We are excited that this collaboration with Call of Duty gives us the opportunity to bring these limited edition specially designed drives to their passionate fans," said Jim Welsh, Senior Vice President of Consumer Solutions at Western Digital. "We know gamers are exceptionally serious when it comes to their gameplay, so we created optimized storage solutions that enable them to keep up with the immersive Call of Duty experience."

The system requirements lists of "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War" were released, covering a broad range of gaming segments, from competitive online play, to recommended AAA campaign playthrough, and even maxed out gameplay with RTX-on. "Black Ops: Cold War" appears to be optimized for an equally diverse set of use cases. There are three disk space requirement levels. For 50 GB you get only the multiplayer component with e-Sports content. For 175 GB, you get the multiplayer component and the single-player campaign. For 250 GB, you get these two, plus additional high-resolution content. Among the use-cases are "minimum," "recommended," "recommended with raytracing," "competitive," and "Ultra RTX."

For starters, there's the absolute bare minimum, which calls for a mid-range 4th Gen Intel "Haswell" or AMD FX "Vishera" processor; along with 8 GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 670 or Radeon HD 7850 graphics (circa 2012), and either 50 GB or 175 GB, depending on what you want to install. The "recommended" tier is for the game with medium-level eye-candy. It calls for a Core i5-2500K or Ryzen 5 1600X processor, 12 GB of RAM, and GTX 970 or GTX 1660 SUPER from the NVIDIA camp; or R9 390 or RX 580 from the AMD camp. "Recommended with raytracing," is essentially minimum requirements for raytraced content. You'll need at least a Core i7-8700K or Ryzen 7 1800X processor, 16 GB of RAM, and at least RTX 3070 graphics (if you can find one).

The end cannot be nigh as long as Activision is able to put out a Call of Duty title for the year, come war, famine, pestilence, or death. The 2020 release of CoD will be reportedly titled "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War," signaling a game set in the era of the original Black Ops. The name first appeared on Tuesday when a an anonymous tipster tweeted it, and Eurogamer later corroborated it. If 2019's Modern Warfare is any indication, Black Ops Cold War could be a retelling of the original Black Ops storyline, away from the future-warfare theme picked up by the two most recent Black Ops titles. Activision has reportedly dropped many hints of the Cold War setting in recent content additions to Warzone.