Want a free copy of Hitman: Absolution, Far Cry 3 and Sleeping Dogs? As part of its Gaming Evolved program of working with game devs, AMD is bundling up free copies of some of the most exciting titles of the coming holiday season with its current generation of graphics cards. If you buy any AMD card, from any add-in board manufacturer at all, the participating etailer/retailer will include a voucher for a free copy of the relevant games.

Participating etailers are as follows:


Overclockers
DABS
Scan
Aria
CCL
eBuyer
Novatech
DinoPC


Every card will also come with a 20% discount on Medal of Honour: Warfighter. It might not be the first game you'd stretch open your wallet for this holiday season, but that discount looks a bit tastier once you've crossed Far Cry 3 and Hitman off your shopping list.

Here’s a handy chart so you can tell which cards will get you which games. Bless AMD for its ambitious bundling of Hitman: Absolution with CrossFire pairings of its HD 7800 and HD 7700 series of cards.



Sadly, if you’re just buying a single HD 7870 (awesome price/performance right now, people!) then you’re only eligible for the Medal of Brothers in Warfighting Duty discount and a copy of Far Cry 3.

So yeah, free games. Nom. What is almost as nommy though is extra free performance from your existing graphics card. To that end AMD is also pushing out a beta of its latest Catalyst driver, version 12.11 and it’s promising some significant performance gains in a number of titles.

In Battlefield 3 it’s looking at 30-40% improvements over the last 12.8 Catalyst drivers. It claims that these performance improvements are down to the fact that its current range of cards carrying the Graphics Core Next architecture represent a brand new direction for its driver team and it’s still finding different ways to unlock latent potential in the chips themselves.

Still, with AMD’s cards being the top price/performance options out there already any extra speed we can squeeze out of our GPUs is always welcome. I’ll be testing the step up in performance later in the week, so stay tuned!

Is that a bird? A scarecrow? A chipmunk? No, it's Agent 47 dressed as a bird, a scarecrow, and a chipmunk - obviously. The bald-headed assassin has long had a thing for disguises, but it appears that Hitman: Absolution will take that fetish to a nun-like extreme. Io's latest trailer showcases 47's newest wardrobe, which, in addition to the usual terrorist, security and chef uniforms, contains more than a few surprises.

For those of us that grew up watching The Bill, whether we wanted to or not, the British copper uniform promises to be a lot of fun. Likewise, we can imagine doing fun things dressed as a judge, a cowboy, and some sort of tinfoil-hat conspiracist. And in the game. Outside of a Worzel Gummidge convention or a field in the middle of nowhere, however, how useful is a scarecrow costume going to be? Or a giant chicken? Perhaps he's going for the double-bluff - no would expect an assassin to be dressed in such an outlandish costume, so that's exactly the sort of costume he should be wearing.

Trailer aside, let's all remember that Hitman is coming out in little over a month. That's plenty of time to sneak into your local game shop dressed as Big Bird from Sesame Street - you can figure out how that will help you bag an early copy once you're there.