AMD Announces Never Settle Game Bundle & Driver

This holiday season, AMD is offering an enticing game bundle for prospective hardware purchasers. They’re also releasing their newest driver, which they say is the best Catalyst yet.

Never Settle Game Bundle

Coinciding with the holidays this year is the release of three big titles – Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Hitman Absolution and Farcry 3. It’s these three titles plus the relatively new title, Sleeping Dogs, that AMD is bringing with their Never Settle bundle.

The biggest bundle offered is with 7900 series GPUs (the HD 7970 and HD 7950, plus their GHz editions). While Medal of Honor Warfighter isn’t a huge discount at 20% off, AMD says this is an exclusive deal and the only Medal of Honor: Warfighter deal anywhere. The biggest deal is that you get Sleeping Dogs, Farcry 3, and Hitman Absolution all free.

Once you move down the AMD GPU spectrum, the offers remain but become a little slimmer. If you buy a single 7800 series or 7770 GHz Edition, you get the MoH deal plus free Farcry 3. If you buy two of each of those, Hitman Absolution is added to the deal.

As a monetary value (assuming full retail price for the games), this is actually a pretty sweet deal.

As far as distribution, these deals will be available on all applicable AMD graphics cards from all participating etailers. Yes, the vast majority of the GPUs to get this deal will be online purchases. Most cards are bought this way anyway, especially in our readership, so that’s fine by us. The method of distribution will be coupons placed in your GPU’s shipping box by your etailer. It should apply to all AMD GPUs in the program, regardless of manufacturer. You’ll get your GPUs, then you use the coupons and apply them at whichever software distributes that particular title (i.e. Steam & Origin).

Never Settle Driver – Catalyst 12.11

Free games aren’t the only thing starting today. AMD’s newest Catalyst 12.11 driver is released today as well. They estimate up to 15% performance gains in many titles.

The biggest performance increases actually come from Battlefield 3. On some maps in some locations, they say they have seen up to 40% FPS increase, 15% was just the average.

BF3 isn’t the only title to reap the benefits of the new driver either. One important thing to note that was rather off-putting on this graph, is resolution. Note that AMD chose to present whatever the highest gain was, resolution independent. Note if you run a different resolution, the performance increase will not be the same and will likely be less. I understand why they might want to put their best foot forward, but that’s a bit extreme in my humble opinion.

They’ve supplied a couple slides of value vs. the competition as well. For those of you skeptical as I am about such broad claims, here is the footnote showing how AMD came up with all of the numbers.

There you have it folks, good news for AMD GPU fans all around. AMD hopes the news will bring some new AMD fans at the same time. It’s a great game bundle if you’re interested in a new AMD GPU for the holidays. The driver improvements will make future and current AMD GPU owners happy.

– Jeremy Vaughan (hokiealumnus)