14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA could have left the world reeling from its announcement about dropping driver support for legacy products, but it chose to soften the blow by announcing a pair of new game bundles.
Specifically, the Santa Clara, California-based company has announced that you can get a downloadable code for Daylight, for free, if you buy certain GeForce GTX add-in boards or laptops.
Daylight is the first game designed on the Unreal Engine 4, in case you were wondering. Which is to say, it has pretty advanced visuals.
The other offer is for in-game currency in three free-to-play games: Warface, Heroes of Newerth, and Path of Exile.
Like other free-to-play games, you can make an account and download them without strings attached, but many in-game goodies and bonuses must be bought with real money. You can get a total of $150 / €170 worth of currency, $50 / €36 per title.
The offers aren't available on the same video cards though. In case of Daylight, you need to buy a GeForce GTX 690, 680, 670, 660 Ti or 650.
That, or a newer card from amongst the following: GeForce GTX Titan, 780 Ti, 780, 770 and 760. Daylight is a pretty demanding game, you see, and needs good hardware.
The redemption code can be retrieved starting on April 8, 2014, since the game hasn't actually launched, and won't until that particular date.
The currency offer, in comparison, is accompanied by pretty mild performance expectations. The bundle is available on GeForce GTX 650, 650 Ti, 750, or 750 Ti graphics cards, as well as on some laptops powered by GTX 700M/800M GPUs.
Free game bundles have been around for ages, but they didn't really start to leave people in awe until a bit over a year ago, when AMD started its Never Settle program, whereby its latest video boards shipped with a hundred dollars' worth (or more) of free, high-end, current-generation games.
AMD has definitely made an impression with Never Settle / Never Settle Forever bundles, even though it's not making as much profit per product as it could. The freebies have definitely been helping shipments though, which was the whole point.
And since Advanced Micro Devices has shown every intention of keeping at it, and also has the AMD Rewards Program live (although some users have likened it to spyware), NVIDIA can't exactly turn a blind eye. The two new bundles are a necessary response, albeit not one on the same level.
