For those of you who haven’t been paying attention recently there has been something of a “game war” going on between AMD and Nvidia. On the AMD side we have seen them expand their Never Settle Reloaded Bundle to include more games than ever before, in addition to that they also speculated that EA’s Battlefield 4 would be part of the next bundle and AMD bundled EA’s SimCity with select A10 and A8 APUs. On the Nvidia side we saw them bundle $150 of in-game credit for free to play games such as World of Tanks, Hawken and Planetside 2 and bundle Metro Last Light with GTX 660s and above.
Now it appears Sapphire is joining in, arranging deals with EA independently of AMD. Sapphire technology is going to be providing a copy of SimCity with its 1GB HD 7790 that it is dubbing the HD 7790 SimCity Edition graphics card. This deal is currently a Japan only exclusive, but it may be expanded to other regions depending on its success. We are not 100% certain if the inclusion of SimCity eliminates eligibility of the Never Settle Reloaded bundle but we certainly hope it doesn’t. It is expected that the SimCity edition of the Sapphire 1GB HD 7790 will be only slightly higher priced than the “normal” variant that doesn’t include the SimCity game, although if the Never Settle Reloaded bundle eligibility is removed in place of SimCity then we would surely expect the pricing to be identical.
As far as the graphics card goes, it is based off the Sapphire HD 7790 2GB OC graphics card design except it is missing the backplate, features only 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM and uses stock AMD clock speeds of 1000MHz core and 6GHz effective memory.
I’ll hand it to AMD, their game bundle is far more exciting compared to nVidia’s, not that I’d classify Sim City as exciting, it’s just not my type of game. That said I’d never let any game sway my decision if I were to purchase a graphics card.