Looking to purchase a new graphics card for your gaming PC? Try taking a stab at AMD's Radeon R9 290, R9 290X or the R9 295X2. Why? Because they come packed with a voucher for a free copy of the upcoming turn-based 4X strategy game, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth. The game arrived on Windows PC back on October 24.
That's just one reason for getting one of the Radeon R9 290 Series cards. In addition to the Beyond Earth "bundle," these three cards qualify for the Never Settle Space Edition, which coughs up a "Gold Reward" voucher for three PC games. That's right; between the bundle and the promotion, customers who purchase a Radeon R9 Series card could walk away with four free PC games. Not too shabby.
News of the Beyond Earth bundle arrives after AMD revealed back in October that the game will be compatible with Mantle right out of the box. That means better performance on AMD GPUs based on the company's Graphics Core Next architecture. The Mantle API was introduced last fall and is supported in a number of games including Battlefield 4 and Thief.
Late last month, 2K Games released a list of minimum specs needed to run Civilization: Beyond Earth. These include an Intel Core 2 Duo clocked at 1.8 GHz or an AMD Athlon X2 64 clocked at 2.0 GHz. On the GPU front, gamers will need an AMD Radeon HD 3650 or better, an Nvidia GeForce GT 8800 or better, or an Intel HD 3000 GPU or better. The specs list also includes 2 GB of RAM, and Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7.
As for recommended specs, PC gamers will need a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz (Intel or AMD) and 4 GB of RAM. The list also shows an AMD Radeon HD 5000 or better, Nvidia's GeForce GT 400 series or better, or Intel's "Ivy Bridge" integrated graphics or better.
"I personally have enjoyed more than 500 hours of game time with the Sid Meier's Civilization franchise, and I'm thrilled by what AMD and Firaxis Games have done with the Mantle graphics API to make Beyond Earth a smooth, high-performance marvel," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, ISV/IHV Partner Group, AMD.
AMD's new Civilization: Beyond Earth promotion begins today.
NOTE: this article was updated to fix the release date of Civilization: Beyond Earth.
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