NVIDIA has decided to extend the availability of their bundle offer for the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards. The company announced last October that gamers who purchase those particular graphics cards would receive a code for the latest entry in the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise. In hindsight, this wasn't much of a big deal for the company; considering general availability for the RTX 30-series, it stands to reason that not many codes were activated, anyway. However, and probably in relation to the continuing shortages on NVIDIA's latest GPUs, the company has extended the bundle's offer through January 11th 2021 - the same day CES is happening. Codes must be redeemed via the GeForce Experience application on a system with a qualifying graphics card installed.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition. Version 20.11.1 beta comes with optimization for Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, DiRT 5, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Godfall. With Godfall, the drivers offer up 7% higher performance as tested with an RX 5700 XT. The driver changelog does not mention any issues fixed with this release, and only a short list of new issues known to AMD, which it's working on to fix. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.11.1The change-log follows.

NVIDIA's add-in-board partners announced bundling Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War with the latest inventories of their GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards. The bundle includes not just the Standard Edition of the game, but also the Woods Operator Pack (a jungle operator pack), and the Confrontation Weapons Pack.

NVIDIA also revealed that in addition to its RTX real-time raytracing technology, Black Ops: Cold War will support the DLSS performance enhancement feature; and NVIDIA Reflex, a whole-system latency reduction feature that should help with the game's competitive online multiplayer. The bundle will be limited to select markets, and through participating retailers.

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).

Shortly after a Doritos-sourced leak on the next installment in the Call of Duty franchise, Activision has now officially confirmed the future of the Call of duty franchise. The next installment, Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, is being hailed as inspired by historical events. And if the title is anything to go by, players can apparently expect to take part in a web of black ops hat are, at the very least, placed somewhere alongside the historical years between 1947 (the beginning of the Truman doctrine) and the USSR's dissolution in 1991 (quick historical fact: the USSR's ultimate dissolution occurred with as much pomp and circumstance as pen to paper, with the signing of the Commonwealth of Independent States at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, in Belarus).

It remains to be seen what - if any - changes to the Call of Duty formula this title will bring. It's being developed by Treyarch, one of Activision's three development studios tasked with bringing the Call of Duty franchise to market yearly, with a three-year development cycle. Raven Software is collaborating with the studio, and we know the title will see integration with Call of Duty Warzone: it's likely Warzone will become a Battle Royale companion to all future Call of Duty titles, added to and updated with the latest installments. Watch the announcement video after the break.