14 DAY TRIAL // We've already talked about the Radeon R9 290X and 2014 GPU Lineup, but those weren't the only things that Advanced Micro Devices presented last night, during the launch event in Hawaii.
Indeed, there were some things during the live blog that got people whispering. We actually speculated about the likelihood of a new Never Settle bundle prior to the live presentation, and last night we saw what came of it.
Much to out disappointment, there was no new Never Settle bundle. Instead, AMD updated the Never Settle Forever offer with Saints Row IV.
To those unaware, Never Settle Forever allows you to choose, out of a couple of dozen titles, 3 games with AMD Radeon HD 7900 graphics card (and, now, the R9 290X we suppose), 2 games for Radeon HD 7800, and 1 game for HD 7700-series adapters.
The other asset that Advanced Micro Devices introduced during the presentation was the Gaming Evolved application.
Actually, it wasn't AMD that revealed it, exactly, but Founder and CEO of Raptr, Dennis "Thresh" Fong (AMD worked with Raptr on it).
Essentially, an alternative to the Geforce Experience program from NVIDIA, the Gaming Evolved App detects the games, hardware, resolution, and settings currently used on all games.
It also has a FPS histogram (tracks every time you play), determines best settings through collaborative filtering (performance, balanced and quality) and can even send data to the Raptr cloud.
It took the two companies a year to develop the software, and they used real data from users, took advantage of the community to establish the best settings. Basically, instead of having a team of software engineers creating rigid settings in a lab, they used all the data they gathered from the public and determined optimal settings via machine learning.
The issue of optimal game setting will never truly be solved fully, since it depends too much on each person's PC, but at least the Gaming Evolved app comes close.
For those in need of further reassurance, we can say that yes, Gaming Evolved can enable full use of 8-core CPUs (though not all games), and 64-bit binaries for BF4 (as well as DirectX 11.1 optimization).
