AMD Talks Graphic Industry’s Trends – Radeon HD 7970 Still The King of $299 Price Segment

AMD passed me a note in which they talked about the the trends of the graphics industry currently and moving into Q3 2013. If you may remember, it has been over a year since AMD released their Radeon HD 7000 graphic cards which include the flagship Radeon HD 7970. AMD assures that their top of the line card is ready for next generation gaming with a strong developer support, improved driver performance and a game bundle that for now remains unmatched. The Radeon HD 7970 was launched on 9th of January at a price of $549 US. Since then, AMD has been hard on work releasing new Catalyst drivers to improve the performance in the latest gaming titles along with slashing the price of these cards for stronger competition against NVIDIA GPUs. Also we have seen new iterations of the GPU which include the GHz edition variant (starting from $369) and the Boost edition HD 7970 (Starting from $399 US).

AMD Talks Graphic’s Industry Trends – Radeon HD 7970 King of $299-$349 Segment

Update: Just as we were about to post this article, we noticed that AMD uploaded a new video on their Youtube channel called “The Fixer” in a response to the launch of GTX 760′s launch tomorrow. Do check out this hilarious short below:

Gamers have admitted that game bundles highly influence their purchasing decisions. Never Settle Reloaded sets the bar in this space with up to $185 in free games: Tomb Raider, BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. Available at participating retailers, this bundle provides the world’s best value to gamers on products like the HD 7970–a graphics card that starts at $329/€299! AMD

The above statement is valid to its core, AMD has offered a strong bundle titled as their “Never Settle” promo that offers great value with their HD 7000 series cards and upto $185 US value with the HD 7970 series cards with titles such as Crysis 3, Bioshock: Infinite, Tomb Raider and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon in the stack. I visit Reddit and various other hardware forums now and then and i see people recommending Radeon HD 7900 series cards due to the value their offer by these game promotions. The bundle also saves alot of load off of their wallets by offering gamers the latest AAA titles.

The Never Settle bundle is not limited to the top GPUs but is extended for the mid range HD 7800 series and mainstream HD 7700 discrete GPUs.

We also saw a growing trend towards 1440P resolution monitors at the beginning of 2010 expanding the wide screen portfolio that many screen makes are aiming for currently. To power gaming at such high resolutions, AMD made the right decision to equip their flagship cards with 3 GB of video ram which provides enough horse power to drive high quality and high resolution textures which shipped with Crysis 2, Crysis 3 and Sleeping Dogs. One thing that was noted with the launch of the next generation Playstation 4 and Xbox One consoles (Powered by AMD Jaguar and Radeon architecture) were much welcomed by developers due to their x86 architecture and most notably the large 8 GB memory pools which give us a hint that memory buffer is going to be a key factor for graphic cards in the next generation of gaming.

AMD Offers Exclusive Optimizations For Next Gen PC Gaming

AMD is also working hard with some of the top developers of the gaming industry including their recent partner ship with EA (Electronic Arts). This partnership means we would be looking at not only exclusive optimizations for the upcoming titles for AMD GPUs but also optimized gaming performance on the PC platform as a whole. Since the Xbox One and Playstation 4 are built using a similar architecture as available on x86 powered PCs, PC gamers would get the benefit by getting more optimized titles and support in next generation.

It has already been confirmed by AMD’s Roy Taylor that EA would exclusively optimize their Frostbite 3 powered games from developer DICE for AMD hardware. What this means is that AMD GPUs would offer consistent frame rates and performance in upcoming games like Battlefield 4, Mirrors Edge (Prequel), Star Wars: Battlefront, NFS Rivals and Dragon Age: Inquisition. All of these four titles are powered by the next iteration of the highly acclaimed Frosbite 3 engine that’s use in the upcoming blockbuster shooter of 2013 – Battlefield 4.

AMD has an update for Crossfire users and those running the flagship Radeon HD 7990 GPU. They are hard at work to release the new Never Settle driver that would fix the Crossfire fame pacing issues currently faced by many using multi-GPU setups. The new driver would release on July 31st and would provide improve the stutter issues and improve frame times on various game titles. In Q3 2013, AMD would expand their Never Settle bundle portfolio with newer titles, offer optimizations in games such as Thief, Battlefield 4 and at the same time improve the value of their HD 7000 series by offering various price cuts to pave way for a complete next generation experience. Also expect an update over the next generation of GPUs by the end of Q3 2013!