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For a long time it has played second fiddle to Nvidia and Intel in the PC components space, but AMD now has other plans.
Being signed as the component supplier for the PS4 (and according to a litany of sources the New Xbox as well), AMD’s position amidst the games hierarchy is certainly on the rise.
The company recently announced its new high-end Radeon HD 7990 graphics card. But that’s just one string of its strategy that spans cloud, console, client and content”.
Gamers are going to benefit on the PC side and on the cloud side by AMD winning in that console segment,” AMD’s senior product manager Devon Nekechuk told PC Gamer.
Since the consoles are really the target for a lot of the game developers if it’s a Radeon heart powering that console, like the PS4 or Xbox 360, that means these games devs are going to be designing their games, designing their features and really optimising for that Radeon heart in the console.”
None of which means that AMD is going to dampen its gaming aspirations. Winning in the component market is really at the core of AMD’s business,” Nekechuk added.
AMD has enjoyed great success in recent months by its extensive bundling efforts. Those who buy an HD 7990, for instance, will also get free copies of Far Cry 3, Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Deux Ex, Hitman Absolution and Sleeping Dogs.
And while it has seemingly conceded defeat to Intel in the CPU space, it’s making tremendous gains in the graphics card sector. The HD 7990 was recently given the honour of powering EA’s impressive debut Battlefield 4 demo.
Not only are we bringing these games to market we’re actually making the games better.” Nekechuk insisted. A big part of the Gaming Evolved program is coming up with features.
We have whole development studios internal to AMD that develop technologies, such as TressFX, and we roll these out to games developers and help them implement them into the games so that the content itself is better than what it was prior to the Gaming Evolved partnership.”
