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<p align="center"></p><p><p> Coinciding with today’s launch of the Radeon R9 270, AMD is announcing that they are putting up new video game bundles for their 200 series cards, the first such bundle on these cards since they started launching a bit over a month ago.</p> <p> First and foremost, the R7 260X will be joining AMD’s Never Settle Forever Silver tier. This means the 260X gets 2 games from that tier (from a selection of 9 games), just as the 7800 series does today. Furthermore the tier itself is also being updated to coincide with today’s bundle launches; Eidos’s upcoming <em>Thief</em> game will be joining the Silver tier, giving 260X buyers (and all other Silver tier holders) the option of grabbing that game if they don’t mind a wait until February of 2014.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"> </p> <p> Meanwhile for the R9 270 and above, all 290 series, 280 series, and 270 series SKUs will be getting a Battlefield 4 bundle. This bundle is separate from Never Settle Forever – BF4 isn’t joining NSF – with all applicable cards receiving just BF4 and nothing from NSF. This is the same bundle that was previously being offered at a price premium on some 290X launch SKUs, so those premium 290X SKUs will be going way in favor of $549 BF4 bundles for everyone.</p> <p> Battlefield 4 of course needs no introduction, being the latest game in EA’s popular line of military shooters. For AMD this means they’ve snagged one of the highest profile PC games of the year, and it means the pump will be primed for December when the BF4 becomes the first game to be Mantle enabled.</p> <p> Unfortunately there does look to be one bit of bad news here, and that is that this bundle will not be retroactive in any way. Normally we wouldn’t expect this anyhow, but with the bundle coming just a week after the launch of the Radeon R9 290, the timing is unfortunate on AMD’s part since it means the 290 was on sale bundle-less for all of 8 days. But with that said, BF4 is something of an odd title to work with anyhow from a co-branding/marketing perspective. It’s not at all clear if EA would even allow their cash cow to be given away for “free” any closer to its launch, seeing as how it only launched a few weeks ago.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"> </p> <p> Ultimately this does at least settle the matter of if and when the 200 series would get a bundle. AMD initially left it bundle-less to take advantage of the early adopter window, while leaving a bundle on the 7000 series to help close out those cards. The inclusion of a bundle at this point would indicate that AMD is apparently satisfied with the progress on clearing out those old GCN cards, and/or sales of the 200 series have tapered off to a point where they need a bit more of an incentive. Regardless this means that we’ll have an interesting holiday bundle battle between AMD and NVIDIA, with AMD’s BF4 bundle going up against NVIDIA’s holiday GeForce game bundle. Considering both bundles apply to sub-$200 cards, this will make for one of the richer holiday bundles that price point has seen in quite some time.</p> </p>
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Source: AnandTech
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