AMD, Blizzard sign agreement

By Candice Jones, ITWeb online telecoms editor

Johannesburg, 13 Aug 2008

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has signed a distribution deal with international game creator Blizzard Entertainment, to bundle certain games with all ATI Radeon graphics cards.

According to AMD country manager Imi Mosaheb, the global deal will trickle down to the South African market once the games have been released. "Depending on the target market of the game, and the specifications, a specific card will be bundled," he says.

The company has not divulged which games will be bundled with the cards. However, many gamers are expecting several high-profile games from Blizzard over the next few months, including the long-awaited Diablo III and the second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

According to AMD's international statement, "the collaboration with Blizzard underscores the mission of its recently announced AMD GAME! initiative, which is dedicated to providing consumers the information they need to help them better understand gaming technology and thus purchase the right systems and components they need to best meet their high-definition gaming needs".

Mosaheb says the deal represents a coup for the company, over dominant competitor NVidia. "Since we launched our 4000 series of graphics cards, we have leapfrogged NVidia in terms of performance."

He says compared to the 3800 series of cards, the performance on the 4000 series has doubled. "This is excellent performance scaling. It is groundbreaking to have scaled by 100% when most generation scaling happens in the 10% to 20% range."

According to Mosaheb, the local market can expect an announcement of a new range of ATI Radeon 4000s in the first half of Q4 this year.

ATI recently released its 4870 X2 card, sporting 2.4 teraflops of processing power and communicating with memory at 230GB per second. International testers and commentators say the range could be AMD's combat strategy to take back market share from NVidia.

The Sapphire HD4870 X2 retails locally at R5 500 including VAT.