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AMD tries to raise gamer awareness with AMD Game
AMD is trying to woo PC gamers again with a branding campaign it hopes will demystify the process of buying a computer for gaming.
“AMD GAME!” is a branding initiative launched today, not unlike the old chestnut “Intel Inside.” PCs that have been vetted for hardware compatibility will earn an “AMD GAME!” or “AMD GAME! Ultra” sticker. The goal, the company said in an interview Friday, is to give shoppers a clear indication of whether a PC will play their favorite games without having to pore over an alphabet soup of processor and graphic card specs.
Partners in the initiative include Microsoft, Austin’s game developer NCsoft and Dell’s Alienware game hardware division.
What will a PC with “AMD GAME!” get you? For an AMD-based system, here are the minimum specs:
- For “AMD GAME!”: A minimum of an AMD Athlon X2 5600+ processor, an ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics card and 2 gigabytes of DDR2 memory. They’ll typically be priced about $699-$999, says AMD.
- For “AMD GAME! Ultra”: A minimum of an AMD Phenom X4 9650 processor, an ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card and 2 gigabytes of DDR2 memory. Typical PC prices for a system like this will be about $999-$1,299, the company said.
For specs below that, PCs would be considered by AMD to cater more to casual users while machines amped up far beyond “Ultra” would be using what the company calls “CrossfireX,” a configuration of multiple graphics card that only hardcore gamers tend to want to deal with.
What will “AMD GAME!” do for gaming? In my experience, games couldn’t care less about the stickers and branding that accompany a new PC. But they will pore over the specs of a system to make sure the graphics card and processor is to their liking, so a little shorthand to avoid the alphabet soup of processors and graphics products might be a good thing.
On the other hand, we’ve all seen what happens when a large-scale branding campaign like Intel’s Viiv is met with the shrugging of shoulders. Does it mean much in the big scheme of the PC market?
AMD is hoping that the world’s 263 million PC gamers worldwide will at least make “AMD GAME!” a factor in future purchases.
One disturbing note, though: In a presentation on which games were solid performers on “AMD GAME!” and “AMD GAME! Ultra” systems, AMD neglected to include the game that most gamers consider the true test of a system’s hardware: “Crysis.” Sure, lots of people play “World of Warcraft” and “Lineage 2,” but “Crysis” is the real torture test and benchmark these days for gaming performance. Its absence in AMD’s pretty frame-rate measurement chart is disturbing, to say the least.
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