Just about anyone who has bought more than one aftermarket graphics card knows that bundled games rarely matter. They're usually year-old titles or neutered editions built only to showcase the GPU's performance for a few hours. AMD thinks its Never Settle bundle might finally get us to notice. Buy any modern Radeon HD video card from the 7770 GHz Edition on up and you'll get a download code for at least one new game you'd genuinely want to try, ranging from Far Cry 3 on basic cards to a full three-game deal that supplies Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs to high rollers buying the 7900 series. There's likewise a discount for Medal of Honor: Warfighter and promises of bundles in 2013 for Bioshock Infinite and the reimagined Tomb Raider. As long as you're not dead set on springing for a GeForce board in the next few months, one of the qualifying cards might be worth a look to jumpstart your game collection.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Peripherals, AMD

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The GHz Edition was supposed to deliver a significant mid-cycle performance bump to AMD's flagship 7970, without any attendant rise in cost. Instead, according to AnandTech, it looks like third-party vendors are looking to exploit the GE has a chance to max out every other spec in addition to the updated silicon and then charge a premium. Sapphire's new Toxic card is a case in point -- a 6GB double-helping of VRAM and a "Lethal" BIOS mode that takes base clock up to 1150MHz and memory clock to 6.4GHz (compared to 6GHz on the stock card). Those who can splutter up $699 will surely love it, but it's no substitute for the $499 upgrade that AMD originally intended.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

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If you've been missing out on the graphics card wars of late, then here's a quick rundown. AMD launched its high-end $549 Radeon HD 7970 at the end of last year, and it reigned comfortably for a few months until NVIDIA came out with the masterful GeForce GTX 680. That would have been the end of the matter, at least for this product cycle, except for one crucial factor: time. Having reached the market so much earlier, AMD has now had six months to not only tweak its drivers but also its 28nm silicon. That process has already culminated in 1GHz cards at the low- and mid-ranges, and today it leads to the (slightly predictable) announcement of a Radeon HD 7970 'GHz Edition' -- priced at $499 and expected to be available from a range of board makers from next week. To keep you amused in the meantime, there's plenty of detail in the gallery below and after the break.

Update: review roundup added here.

Gallery: Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition official slide deck

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AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster may have just dropped a minor graphics bombshell at the end of the AMD Fusion Developer Summit. His presentation was officially to show off the FirePro W9000, a beast of a workstation graphics card with 6GB of GDDR5 memory, a 264.8-megapixel fill rate and four teraflops of single-precision math. While the screen behind him showed the one-fan FirePro card, however, he was clearly holding another, three-fan card in his hands -- and though it could be that the W9000's cooling system went through a major revision between presentation slide and production, it may be a clue to a gamer-friendly Radeon part instead. Attendees like Tweakers.net have reason to believe it might be the Radeon HD 7990, a long-rumored dual-chip version of the 7900 series for the very upper echelons of gamers. If so, the bets are on it keeping up the tradition of having two slightly underclocked versions of AMD's fastest chip (here the Radeon HD 7970) working in tandem to produce a big leap in speed despite occupying the same two card slots. AMD hasn't set the matter straight with either a yea or a nay, but with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 largely cornering the high-end market unopposed, it's tough to picture AMD simply twiddling its thumbs.

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AMD's Radeon HD 7770 and 7870 reference cards already sport 1GHz clock speeds, but so far the high-end flagship 7970 has been stuck at 925MHz. That'd be no big deal, perhaps, were it not for rival NVIDIA's benchmark-stealing GeForce GTX 680, which autonomously adjusts its clock speed on the fly and easily hits 1.2GHz under the right conditions. But while NVIDIA has yet to roll out its full stack of 28nm cards, AMD is finding plenty of time to play catch-up. According to Australian site Atomic MPC, the company has revealed that the manufacturing process of its next-gen GPUs has improved to the point where the same average voltages can yield much higher clock speeds. Recent chips can reach 1.25GHz without struggling, which means a conservative "GHz Edition" of the 7970 can now safely be rolled out, of course with scope for much higher overclocking on third-party boards with more robust coolers. By the time the battle between Red and Green reaches full-swing, it might not be so easy to call a winner.

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Now that NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 is shipping through some vendors, gamers have been wondering if it's worth the wallet-busting $999 to get those higher frame rates. Surprisingly, the answer is "yes." As AnandTech notes, the GTX 690 is often almost as fast or faster than a pair of GTX 680s working together in SLI mode, only using less power and running at cooler and quieter power levels through those two 28-nanometer Kepler chips. Across multiple reviewers, though, the GTX 690 was sometimes slower than two Radeon HD 7970 boards using CrossFire. HotHardware and others found that it's definitely the graphics card of choice for Batman: Arkham City enthusiasts: problems with AMD's CrossFire mode leave a dual Radeon HD 7970 setup running at just half the frame rate of its NVIDIA-made challenger.

Caveats? There are still some worries beyond the price tag, as the twin Radeon cards are as much as three times faster at general-purpose computing tasks than the latest and greatest GeForce. PC Perspective likewise warns that fans of joining three displays together for some 3D Vision Surround action will still take a big frame rate hit when they put the 3D glasses on. Still, the GTX 690 looks to be tops if you're looking to get the fastest single-card gaming on Earth, and as Legit Reviews adds, that trivalent chromium-plated aluminum makes it one of the "better looking" cards, to boot.

Read - AnandTech
Read - HotHardware
Read - Legit Reviews
Read - PC Perspective

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