We haven't seen much in the way of GPU promotions the last few years. Time was, nearly every graphics card purchase came with one or two free games to sweeten the deal. A win-win, really: Companies offload sluggish or end-of-life stock, and soften the blow of a $500 GPU purchase. But there's been no need for AMD and Nvidia to sweeten the deal as long as every card they made was snatched up by crypto miners. Purchase a Radeon RX 580, 570, or Vega graphics card at a participating between now and November 3 and you'll receive codes (eventually) for three upcoming games: Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, the Star Control: Origins reboot, and Rebellion's 1930s-themed shooter Strange Brigade.

When Firaxis launched the underrated Civilization: Beyond Earth two years ago, the game served as a showcase for what was possible using AMD's revolutionary "close to the metal" Mantle API, featuring unorthodox "split frame rendering" to deliver extraordinary smoothness in systems with multiple Radeon graphics cards. Two years later, Mantle is dead, subsumed by Vulkan and rivaled by Microsoft's own DirectX 12. But the close ties between AMD and Firaxis is not. Wednesday morning, the two companies revealed that they've partnered up yet again to bake DirectX12 support into the hotly anticipated Civilization VI. Split frame rendering won't be returning, sadly, but the game will feature a pair of DX12 highlight features: Explicit multi-adapter and asynchronous compute.