All graphics cards from Radeon R9 290 upwards get it

Nov 6, 2014 09:17 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA may have revealed its “Pick Your Path” game bundle program the other day, but Advanced Micro Devices isn't going to abandon its lead any time soon. In fact, it has just revealed a new offer of its own.

Graphics cards sell well enough on their own, despite integrated graphics chips in CPUs, but there's nothing wrong with a little extra incentive.

That's why AMD's Never Settle program exists. Through it, the company ships one, two, three or four games with its high-end graphics adapters.

Considering that those game sets can sell, on their own, for the same amount as a video board, that's a really good deal to have. It's no wonder that NVIDIA adopted the tactic.

Behold the latest version of AMD Never Settle

Initially, there were only several games in the Never Settle bundle, but now there are over thirty. Depending on what card you buy, you get the Bronze reward (one game), the Silver Reward (two games), the Gold Reward (three games), or the Ruby Reward (four games).

Occasionally, AMD may offer temporary super-deals called Diamond or whatever else. That's more or less what's happening at the moment.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company has revealed the Never Settle: Space Edition game offer, which ships Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth to anyone buying the Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X, and R9 290 GPUs. The deal starts today, November 6.

Why this is more important than usual

AMD has been collaborating with game makers extensively, to allow its technologies to be properly used by the software code. Civilization: Beyond Earth happens to use the Mantle API, which AMD revealed as an alternative to DirectX a while ago.

The game also has Split Frame support, a technology that improves frame rates in CrossFire multi-GPU setups.

With Radeon R9 290X and 290 graphics cards going through a price cut, there might be quite a few people in the market for a new video board, so the new game offer chose a pretty good time to show up.

Availability and pricing

As we said, the games are shipped for free alongside the card of your choice. Civilization: Beyond Earth is only included in the Gold+ offer though (20+6 games on the tier), which is paired with the Radeon R9 290 and better boards, as we said above.

The game tiers (Gold, Silver, Bronze) don't have the same titles available to customers. So while the total game count is a bit higher than thirty, no single tier has more than 26.