Worth a bundle —

AMD expands free game offer to try to juice GPU sales

Top-end graphics cards now come with up to three recent releases.

AMD expands free game offer to try to juice GPU sales

Facing worrying job cuts, investor downgrades, and potential irrelevance in the market, AMD is trying to attract attention to its line of gaming GPUs by expanding its "Never Settle" bundling program to include up to three new games.

Consumers that purchase AMD's top-end Radeon 7900 series of GPUs will now get license codes to download Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution, and Sleeping Dogs. The lower-end 7700 or 7800 series cards come with a code for FarCry 3, but customers can add a license for Hitman: Absolution by buying two of the lower-end cards at once. Each of the graphics cards will also come with a coupon for a 20 percent discount off the Digital Deluxe Edition of Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

Bundling hot new games with graphics cards isn't exactly a new practice: AMD has been offering Sleeping Dogs with its cards since this summer, replacing a previous bundle with DiRT Showdown, and Nvidia is currently offering Borderlands 2 with its GeForce cards. But offering $170 worth of newly released games and coupons with a graphics card that retails for just over $300 is a major expansion of the practice, and a sign that AMD is trying hard to differentiate its graphics hardware from the competition this holiday season.

AMD is also using the promotion as a way to highlight its new Catalyst 12.11 drivers, which it says have been tuned to provide performance gains of up to 15 percent on titles from its "Gaming Evolved" partners, including Far Cry 3, Hitman Absolution, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

Channel Ars Technica